Extrude face
 

My blue manipulator handle doesn't respond. I can extrude the face by grabbing the center square and extending it however it is not paralllel to the polygon's sides. Do I need to set the tool preferences? the green and red manipulator handles seem to work just fine. When I pull the blue handle, nothing happens and it just returns to it's starting postion. Any advice?

The blue handle is supposed to align the tools to the world view. if that's what you want and you can't use the handle for some reason you can check 'World' in the tool settings, or use 'Reset tool'.

If you want the tools to adjust the face according to the face normals you can use 'set to face' or 'set to edge' in the tool settings.

Hope this helps,
Benny