Are you using Windows?
If so sorry, back when I was using Micro$oft products I had to use Adobe Photoshop to make an Avatar. By the time I was done I had several hundred bucks into software. Now I have given up on Windows and switched to Linux. It is free, and it does not get killed by viruses every other day. It has a program called the Gimp, which converted my photo to a 100X100 pixel avatar in two steps. No three steps, I had to crop the image too. Anyway I'm running Mepis. It was pretty easy to install, and it works very well.
Brian Rodgers <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/butwiggle.gif" alt="" />
http://www.mepis.org/