AFAIK the animations never worked anyway as the icon for the kickoff menu. the animations were disabled because of the Qt4 port and never got re-enabled. Now that we don't even use the weird custom icons that were used by kickoff, it's irrelevant.
What the last file included does, I do not know. I will need to verify if it can be removed from the code before removing it totally.
If the image can't be removed, sounds as though we can at least convert to static PNG. Agree?
Darrell