transparent gifs...again

I know there has been much discussion on this list about making transparent
gifs, and I'm not trying to rehash an old topic, but I am having trouble
understanding some things about gifs and how to handle them when using them
to make other images.

For example:  I was trying to make a banner advertising a URL.  I already
have a banner background which is saved as a gif.  I opened this image and
opened another gif image, which I wanted to copy onto the banner.  (I'm
using Photoshop 5, PC version).

The gif image of a book is saved on a gray background... every gif gets some
color of background, even when I save them as transparent.  My problem is...
I wanted to simply do a selection (select all) of the image of a book, and
copy it onto the banner.  When I did that, the book went onto the banner
with its gray background, and I wanted just the book to copy, not it's
background.  So now I'm in the position of needing to "cut-out" the image
with that laborious lasso tool... sigh.  And this was what I was trying to
avoid by using a gif image in the first place!

These are my questions:

1.  Do I have to cut-out an image saved as a gif to get rid of the
background when copying it to another image?
2.  If there is a way to copy a gif onto another image, is there a way to do
this with jpg's also, without cutting it out?
3.  Does anyone know of a simple procedure using either PS5 or PSP4 to copy
images onto another image to make a composite... without cutting out the
foreground of every image that has a different colored background than what
I want?

If this is impossible to do, then what good does it do to buy image
collections to use to make other composite images, if you can't use them
except for things that have matching backgrounds?

Thanks in advance.. this has really got me stumped.

Lonna

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