There's a setting in the prefs for choosing tablet or mouse control, that could be it. Switch to whatever you're using. Could also be that you've set either local or world transforms. Change to local if it's on world.
Ah, hey :P For vegetation, I use the "morph to normals" function of my toolkit. I've got a local version that only does it for the selected verts (will be in the next release when I get around to it). So I can run Update on the mesh and then select the foliage verts and run the morph-to-normals to give them a bushy feel.…