Ah, cheers then. I would recommend spending some time getting used to working with local transforms on. You may not find a need for it when viewing the whole model, but if you're zoomed in on something like a foot and you only want to rotate the view around the foot, that's when it really comes in handy.
It's possible you either you don't have 'rotate on all axis' toggled on which could limit the axis of rotation, or you may be using local transformations (which will use the last place you clicked on the model as the center/axis of the rotation). This may also fix the shift-clicking issue, if I'm reading and visualling the…