My suggestion to you would be if you HAD to use PS to do this to a folder of mixed images as you described, that you do it before doing any cropping or rotating. They all come out of the camera the same size which would let you plug in the exact numbers you need to resize smaller.

If you DO crop the photos, why not crop to the pixel dimensions you need while you’re at it? I do this a lot, I’ll go in and fix up a pic (crop, brighten, sharpen, whatever), then resize to the size I want to print and save, resize for web and save and resize again to thumbnail and save. I even wrote an action to do this for me to save time. Then I don’t have to resize the whole folder since I was going to open each image anyway I might as well do it while I’m there.

The only time I use the batch resize is if I’m NOT going to do any editing at all to the photos, in which case they are SOOC (straight out of camera) and all the same size, so I can just plug in the numbers with the right proportions in PS.

That said, I keep PSE around just for some of the color correction tools (and for writing tuts of course). Check out my little blue men…http://www.scrappersworkshop.com/quick-tip-tuesday-seeing-little-blue-men