I've tried all possible coordinate settings I can think of!  I changed the scene coordinates to "normal", "local", "view", and even "world" again.  I also tried changing the coordinates in the scale tool, in the left panel that pops up after enabling the S hotkey to all of the provided coordinate orientations in the dropdown menu it provided.  I even tried enabling the "proportional" editing option.  Even after all that, every time I hit the S hotkey, the scale gizmo does the same thing,.. pushes or pulls the faces toward or away from each other while scaling!  Why?  There MUST be a way to do this, or else I'm going to have to reconsider my entire workflow whenever I model certain objects in Blender. gulp.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.