make sure your vertex groups are only effected by the specific bones, or
you may have the weight painting over too much of the… sponge area(same idea).
The hot key for proportional editing is O (that’s oh.) It’s a toggle, if it’s on, type O to turn it off. When it’s on you’ll have an orange donut shaped icon in the 3d window header in edit mode. If it’s off, the donut is grey.
Rigging is adding an armature and bones to pose or animate the model. You can change your renders to jpg or png, to avoid the godawful file sizes you get with bmps, and then you can attach your screenshots here, so more people can see and maybe help solve your problem. A screenshot in wire frame mode might help.
To change to jpgs, press the Render context icon in the button window header, and change the Format in the format panel to jpg.