Joint Project 1: Baddies - trouble with Attr's

[Tyhm]

I'm trying to assemble a really basic Baddy script over on the Playerworld Main board so everyone will have access to the same sorts of tools we all had back when the world was clientside (but with the added advantage that this time, we can script the baddies to shoot fireballs out of their ears or whatever else we want to modify them to do)-
Point is, I've made a bunch of baddy ganis, but I keep running into a handfull of problems.
1) Back in 2003 when I first made these, I used Attr5 (horse) to store the baddy's "skin" image (ie, baddygray.png). Nowadays when I use Attr5, it overrides the gani and puts the showcharacter on a messed up horse...so I'm switching to using #3/head, which isn't perfect as I'd like the same ganis to be usable if someone ever made a player-race-baddy. If I move it to Attr8/Body, will that give me yet more problems?
2) The original Swampsoldier used putleaps0,x,y in its "script" - which is now a clientside-only command, I guess...anyway, I put a ganiscript in to emulate that and it never does anything. Not sure why. Anyone else run into this?
3) Is there a simple way of making a gani flicker (ie, when hurt) short of changing ganis to a flickering version? Contrariwise, is there a way to jump from frame 5 of one gani to frame 5 of an alternate gani?

I'm way outta my depth here, so I'd appreciate any help I can get. Everyone's free to do what they like with the finished product, I'd just prefer if all the intermediate work on it was public domain so we don't have a different Basic Baddy Gani for every server, etc.