gif highway shield transparency issues

[Clever, Max]

Hi All,

I have been flustered with trying to make the canvas of my interstate shield transparent.  I'm using Mapserver 3.6 and right now it displays the shield with the white square canvas background around it.  I would like for only the shield to appear on the map.  I'm only a novice at using fireworks, but I have been using it to make the canvas transparent, and I checked the color index of the transparency in the export preview and it reads. 

R:255 G:255 B:255 Hex:ffffff index:000 Websafe
Transparent

My symbol shapefile reads like this

# 15
Symbol
NAME 'Interstate'
Type PIXMAP
IMAGE "interstate-shield.gif"
TRANSPARENT 0
END

Am I not making the gif transparent properly in fireworks?  I've also tried "TRANSPARENT 000" but to no avail.  Hopefully I've given enough information of my problem to help solve the problem.  Any advice is welcome.

Thanks,
Max Clever