>I am trying to create a picture for my profile, but once I shrink the pic down it loses a lot of quality and I look worse than I usually do (and that's saying a lot). I am just using Paint in Windows, as I have no other photo editing tools. Anybody know of any good freebies that would work better?

Yes, of course, that would be a normal reaction from such a software. You might want to use something better for image manipulation such as resizing and redimensioning such as LView Pro. Make sure also that you use a software that can manipulate JPG, which is the format recommended for such image manipulation.