Chaos publishing with illustrated characters

Since Articulate '13 came with illustrated characters, I thought it would be fun to do a module in the form of a comic strip.  I used a lot of the illustrated characters, cropping most of them because I wanted mostly waist up characters.  When I published, the first thing I noticed was that most of my characters weren't cropped.  Next I noticed that most were too high on the slides.  Next I noticed that they were slightly distorted - too wide for their heights.  Then my presentation started going crazy.  I tried to pause it - couldn't pause.  Tried to play it - couldn't play.  It was halfway in between like a record skipping.  I closed the presentation and went back to the ppt, but then that was going crazy.  I closed ppt, still crazy things happening.  I rebooted my computer, restarted ppt.  My presentation which had been 31 slides is now 390, the extras all being in the middle and only having the background (a simple gradient).