Looking for help

Hello everyone.. I am really hoping someone here can help me. I learned how much I really enjot making icons while I had the trial version on PSP8. But then my trial ran out and I can't afford to buy it. So I got a less expensive version of a Photo editing program called Microsoft Picture It! Photo Premium. I was wondring if anyone here happened to have expirence working with this program. I am having an absolutely horrible time cropping and resizing and getting them to be 100x100. I've been struggling with this for days. I know there must be a way to do it but I just can't seem to figure it out. I have gone all through the instructions and videos and they tell you how to do a basic crop but once I do that..and try to resize it to 100x100 pixils..it looks terrible.
I'm stumped and would appreciate any help you cna give me. Thanks!