two icon questions (PSP 9)

hi everyone, i hope i am asking this in the correct community. i have gone thru the faq and the memories and have followed every tutorial as best i can and am still having the same two problems.

i am using PSP9. here is an example:


the frankie font... i can't get it any smaller. i've seen the font examples ernest, sevenet, etc at the correct sizes with the anti-alias off, but still they are blurry and unreadable. so i have to make the font bigger in order for it to be legible. the font on this icon, gosh, i can't remember, but i want to say ernest at like 12.

my second question is cropping and resizing. say i take a normal size picture, crop out the part i want to icon, double click so only that part is showing then go to image --resize-- 100x100 and it resizes, but it's all blurry and sort of pixelated looking.. what am i doing wrong??

any help with these questions would be entirely appreciated!!

thanks :)
nikki