Hehehe...finally my brain woke up and I fixed the problem. Simply made a safe .gif file of the same name, emailed it to myself, and overwrote the bad file. Problem solved. Picture file can be accessed again with no crashing. Duh.
Thanks to everyone for your help. I've learned a lot about my new friend over the last few days
I'll be around...soon...I'm sure...when I break it again