I really NEED help!

[Innocentius]

My backgrounf image is in .jpg format, therefore it's rather large, but i can't change it to a .gif without destroying the colours, hmmm....

[polestar]

Not much you can do about this...

Either use a program like PSP to decrease the colour depth to 8-bit using techniques like error diffusion and optimised median cut before you save it as a GIF.

Or leave it as a JPG but increase the compression ratio and hence lower the filesize.

But a GIF still always has 8-bit colour.