If there is anything I can do to help, let me know.
I was able to cobble together a solution that got me a working slideshow, but I don't think anyone would want to go through the trouble. Here's what I did:
I put all of the images on the timeline, then applied the Ken Burns effect to the second image (the first image was a black screen). In order to get the effect to stop "jumping" I had to move the effect < 1 frame before the transition. I think I moved it about .02 seconds in front of the transition. If you MOVE the effect (instead of dragging the leading edge), the effect duration will stay the same, and this is what I wanted - that way, I can duplicate the effect, and the next effect always starts .02 seconds before the image transition. Just keep duplicating the effect, and it'll create a separate effect for each image.
IMPORTANT! You'll want to EDIT each effect to set the start/end positions and direction - before you do, SAVE YOUR PROJECT. I often found that when I edited the effect, the editor would hang, and I'd have to use task manager to kill it. SAVE FIRST!!!
Once you have all the effects working the way you want, render the project - without ANY transitions applied. We're just rendering the effect on each picture. To keep quality, I rendered it to uncompressed frames. Now create a new project and import the rendered video. Go through the video and cut at each picture switch (if all your pictures are the same duration, this is not that hard). Once you've cut them, you can apply transitions between them. When you like it, add a soundtrack (because if you decide to do any editing, your sound track is cut, which isn't what you're going to want). Save that and render again to get the final slide show - with nice movement and smooth transitions - no jumps.
For now, I'll go back to using Adobe Premiere for my slide shows - it's overkill, but it doesn't require all of these workarounds. Hopefully, AVS4YOU can fix the problem with jumping effects, and allow us to apply effects to CLIPS (so they're rendered BEFORE transitions) as well as applying them to a section of the timeline. This *could* be a great piece of software for doing nice slideshows, but right now it needs too much extra work.
One other thing programs like Premiere allow you to do is "animate" effects. In Video Editor, The Ken Burns effect is automatically animated, but all others are static. Wouldn't it be cool if you could set start & end parameters for the effect, so it would change the effect over time? Imagine the water color effect, gradually decreasing the size so you start with a simple water color, and it gradually fades the effect revealing a photo? That is a beautiful effect, but difficult to pull off in Video Editor. I did it in this show by creating about 10 effects, most of them only last about .5 seconds, and each subsequent effect had a different setting. It was a bit rougher than I wanted, but it works.