Windows Movie Maker publish degrades picture quality

i am working on making a slideshow of a few pictures. movie maker seemed great to me in doing this. it's easy to add music or effects and all but the problem is that after publishing, it degrades the pic's quality. i have tried publishing in all the options.
the NTSC something option created a 3gb+ video file but still the quality was poor.
any help??

is everyone on holiday?? :|