Cropping, Marquee issues

One of the greatest things about FW is its intuitiveness: One rarely has to think very hard to perform basic image editing tasks. However, I have noticed recently that in cropping a portion of an image--the part actually on the canvass--the copy paste results in the entire image being copied, even though the "ants" only surround the canvass. Same thing with the marquee tool. I literally have to combine all layers and flatten the entire selection, THEN crop in order to get only the portion I want. This adds several steps to a simple operation, as I have to undo every step to keep the editable image. Am I insane, or is this normal for FW?...