Which one are you using?

Adobe ImageReady 7.0

It's only as the finished gif that it shows the artifacts. I extracted the individual frames from the original gif (the one with the artifacts) in three different programs and each frame is how it should be!?!!?!?

As for the delay, ImageReady gives you the option of user defined time.
I just use the default which is 0 sec.

About Jemplode's animation tool, I noticed that if you have identical frames in your "imported" file, Jemplode gives it the same frame sequence number. So in other words, if you have the same frame for frame 17 as frame 03, you won't see frame 17 in the finished file.