Dave,
You may have better luck using Piclab for the color reduction part of
this task. It does a great job of converting Targas to 256 color GIF's for
animator.
Piclab written by Lee Crocker is a free program available in the
GRAPHSUPPORT forum. It does image processing and can be set up to work with
script files so you can easily convert all your targas from the command
line. The program doesn't have a nice graphic front end like AAPRO, but it
is free and very powerful.
Feel free to ask any questions if you need help with it.
Hope that helps!
Drew