I've seen similar issues in the past but never figured it out (especially the "double-rotate" thing you mentioned before).
I'm really posting here for a related request.
Can you please, please, please change the rotate commands when an image playlist is in Playing Now to
only rotate the currently playing image? As it is, you have to do all your rotations from Thumbnails because if you "play" any files it rotates them all (which is pretty useless really -- if you really want to rotate a big batch of images it would be easier to mass-select them in Thumbnail view and rotate them that way).
Plus, there's actually a worse issue:
If you double click on an image to play it (with the default Options --> General --> Behavior --> Double Click setting of Replace Playing Now (all)), it "plays" the whole list. Then, if you click Back to go back to your view from Playing Now (or if you don't have it set to auto-jump to Playing Now) it appears that only that one image is selected (only the one you double clicked is highlighted). Like this:
However, if you click the rotate button on a toolbar right then, it will actually rotate every image in the list, rather than that one image!!! This annoys me constantly, and makes it very difficult (and somewhat dangerous) to use the rotation commands in MC.
I think these two things are related (MC appears to be rotating the current Playing Now list). Rotating should be limited to selected files only, I think!