GIMP Version: 2.8.14
Operating System: Windows
GIMP Experience: Intermediate Level

List any relevant plug-ins or scripts:
Gap

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For starters, sorry about my long absence, I hope to be more active in the coming months. I have a question regarding making collages that include GIF's. It seems that when I try to include more than 1 GIF in a collage, I get a bunch of distortion. I have tried manually merging the frames of two GIF's, and have tried running them side by side, but either way I get pixelisation or color loss. Is this just too much for the system? Any ideas?
Here's an example of what I'm doing (only with 1 GIF...) I captured the video from a movie (God's of Egypt) and built the frame from a stock Anubis image

For the sake of replication, what I did there was to make a static image or "frame" (overlay), and then copied it and merged it down on top of every frame for the GIF that I made...you can see that there is distortion that wasn't part of the design. There are a few spots that are contaminated with white on the right side, and not the left...the left is just a copy of the right (the right shows the flaws) that has been flipped horizontally, so should in theory be exactly the same. These images are being built as signatures for forums, and my problem came about when I tried to add a revving tachometer image (gif) to a bounce meter image(gif) with a static car image for a frame....representing a car revving and a stereo blasting in the same image...
here's another (I know...a little Gaussian blur around the static image would be perfect...oops)

A GIF image is color-indexed and there are only 256 colors in a GIF across all frames. When you import a new GIF, its colors are shoehorned into the colors of the base image, which is often not a pretty sight. You can do Image>Mode>RGB to stop using color-indexed mode whle you edit (before importing other images, of course) but keep in mind that when you export to GIF again, you are back to 256 colors total and all the images (original + imports) will be damaged to some degree.

That explains a lot! Thanx Ofnuts, I will work with that in mind and see if I can't bend this idea to my will...

Also look into applying dithering to reduce banding. I'm not proficient enough with Gimp, but I'm pretty sure it will have some form of dithering that you can apply......

Here is an example of "Floyd Strindberg" dithering applied to just one one of the two frames....