Hmm. What a nuisance!

I only know of one way to prevent movement, scaling and rotating. This involves locking the relevant attributes in the channel box. In that case, the fields are greyed-out in the channel box, and the manipulators (scale, move, rotate) all turn grey.

If this isn't the problem, perhaps a screen-shot or a model would help answer your question.

Here's what I mean about the locked channels.

EDIT: If this is the problem, right click on the attribute name in the channel box and select "Unlock Selected"