Someone found a bug where the language would switch to something other than English on some systems. This should be fixed now and should always default to English rather than a broken version of German or Italian etc.. :)
GIF support has been temporarily disabled as I think it's currently more trouble to use than it's worth. The GIF library I was using is really slow and lacks a lot of features like transparency etc. I think it's better if this option is hidden until I can improve it.