External Ad is put in iFrame - improper presentation

We are trying to use the External Ad with a .gif ad that is on our customer's site. We can manually point our browser to that .gif ad and it shows properly and at the correct size (90x728). When we create a External Ad and activate it, several problems have occurred.

1. the ad shows at a reduced size and is inside an iFrame. The presence of the iFrame throws our page layout out of wack and the ad can't be clicked because the cursor becomes a zoom in/out action instead. The settings for Ad Module are jQuery and switching to Javascript did not fix this problem.
2. this second problem is that when we first created the ad, all vistors to our site were getting drupal errors reporting:

   file_get_contents(http://www.example.com/gbi/10048/31377/22693/28017/image.gif) [<a href='function.file-get-contents'>function.file-get-contents</a>]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /home/mthitra0/public_html/dev/mthink/sites/all/modules/ad/external/ad_external.module on line 195.
   

   This seemed to be occurring regardless of ad status, as the ad was set to pending and the error presisted. We tried 'offline' and 'expired' also but the errors continued. We finally deleted the ad to stop the errors.

I have searched the forum and issues and have not found anything on this behavior of External Ads; although, I did see several articles that were getting similar problems with a "file_get_contents...." error but in different situations and with different sub-errors.

We would like to use External ads. Does anyone have some ideas that might get us around these errors? We don't use iFrames and so External Ads being placed in iFrames seems to be a big problem to our page layouts so I hope that there is a non-iframe approach for external ads.

I tried working around our immediate problem by taking the customer's remote ad to instead use Ad Module's Image ad with a remote file, but ran into errors that prohibited its use (opened its own issue).