By any chance, if you are a humble animator and your little work station at home is using ATI 4800 series graphic card, you may get this little but annoy problem in MAYA.
My computer is using Radeon 4870 series and when I updated Catalyst driver to 9.XX series, I've found that in MAYA the rotation tool was acting wired. I could not Free rotate the object and could not select in Axis I want.
I just found out that this problem is occurred because of the graphic card driver so the way to solve it is to uninstall Catalyst driver and use the old driver (8.xx series).
The way to uninstall the driver is not quite easy. You can find the tutorial here
Previous ATI drivers HERE
PS. I don't know that the latest Catalyst driver (9.6) has solved this problem or not (I used 9.5 before.) But if you got the same problem as me, just uninstall the driver and use the 8.12 version.
Problem solve!