unable to scale image – error message

I have been able to successfully scale photos and add them to my side bar, but now I am trying to scale an image and add it to my content area. I repeatedly get an error message “Error while saving the scaled image. Please reload the page and try again.” I have tried reloading and re-scaling several times, but the pixels entered and calculated by the scaling fixture do not “stick” I also have a red asterix next to the title of photo (or whatever that first box is) on the image edit area.

I could not find any questions on this topic in the forum.
Thanks