The OP is correct. Chrome has poor GIF support. In July 2009 animated GIF's completely failed to load and show up. Now that's all patched up but the animations are always buggy and sometimes the animation do not repeat when you recreate a new element with a non-looping GIF animation.
If you would like a bulletproof work around, you can create a png sprite image that is animated using some nice javascript. Please note that for most cases a simple GIF should suffice. HOWEVER, recenty (as in yesterday) I had to go the PNG sprite method because I required a non-looping GIF anaimation to show up numerous times in a page. Chrome caches the image and does not re-run the animation when a new instance of the GIF image is created in javascript. THus the requirment for me to use sprite images.