showWaitAlert animation freezing in IE 8+9

I have a custom application that is taking some time to load, so I'm using the showWaitAlert() function to display a message asking the users to wait until the page finishes loading.

However, in IE 8+9, the animation provided by the showWaitAlert() function is frozen until the page finishes loading. If I do not call removeWaitAlert() to hide the message when the page finishes loading, the animation starts moving as soon as the page loads, so it's not completely failing, just useless for its intended purpose of letting the customer know the program hasn't frozen. I have tested this same page in Firefox 28, and it works perfectly.

Here is the code I'm using to display the message:
showWaitAlert("Please wait, gathering hours worked information for employees.");

In Firefox, I am also able to use subsequent removeWaitAlert() calls to update the message to show progress, and this also doesn't work in IE.

The code:
showWaitAlert("Please wait, gathering hours worked information for employees.
Loaded direct reports.");

In trying to resolve this issue I have seen that IE can have issues with animated GIF's, which is what is being used to provide the animation in the showWaitAlert() function, but since IE is all Lawson/Infor officially uses (last I heard), I am assuming that there should be a workaround or that I'm missing something. Any help would be appreciated.

Here is the entire function, which is called onload:


function OpenProgram()
{

    stylePage();
    
    showWaitAlert("Please wait, gathering hours worked information for employees.");

    authenticate("frameNm='jsreturn'|funcNm='InitMgrHrsWkd()'|desiredEdit='EM'");      
}