Yeah, that's my job. 
You don't need Physics.
So, let that be your solution. You don't need anything fancy. You could use brute force to create your particles manually. Sure, it's tedious, but you've already spent hours trying to solve this problem. Creating particles dynamically might be overkill for what you're trying to accomplish.
And with Hype's motion paths, you can create a nice effect...
Once you have the one particle, it's easy to duplicate it and create more particles.
The final HTML export was less than 70K. (If you're not supporting IE 6-9, you can dramatically reduce the size of the export. Also, the restorable file is for backups, not for banner ad networks.) That should leave you plenty of room for some graphics and some more particles.
