I resize it in some shady round about way. Right click it, and COPY. Then go to Start - Programs - Accessories - Paint.
Right-click the page that opens and PASTE. You may see a question whether to resize the page... accept resizing.
Now at the top Menu, go to Image-Attributes. That gives you the size of the picture. The more square your picture is, the more symmetrical it will look when you use it in your avatar, so try to crop the width or height so that the dimensions match. To crop, use the art tools provided on the left and the handles around the edges of the picture.
Next I do a bit of math. OK, I wanna shrink the picture to 80 x 80. So if my picture's attributes are 250 x 250, I enter into my calculator 80 / 250 = and I get 0.32 That tells me that I need to shrink my picture by 32%. So I go Image-Stretch and type in 32 horizontal 32 vertical and enter...and voilà! But just to be sure, you can go back to Image-Attributes to see the new dimensions. They will be 80 x 80.
If your calculation doesn't give you a nice two decimal answer, you will have to round off. If the pics shrinks to a size slighltly larger than 80 x 80, I might use the handles on the edges and corners of the pic to manually alter the size using trial and error. If you do anything you didn't mean to do by mistake, just go to Edit-Undo, then try again. You can always undo the last 3 moves you made if you don't save changes. /images/graemlins/smile.gif
HTH