I ran into this once when retouching some photos. The company I had to send the final pictures to wanted them to be 300 dpi, and that's all the info they'd give me. So, I resized the photo for him. It wasn't a high quality picture I was working with, and it ended up being something like 300 at 3"x5" or something like that. It worked out perfectly for them.
It ended up that the guy I was working with was running the operation, but he wasn't the guy doing the layout. Maybe the same case is at work here.