You could be doing a bunch of things wrong. E3d has many properties that handle rotation. (replicator rotation, particle rotation, deformation rotations and so on).
The easiest thing to do is to go into the scene setup, arrange all three objects in the same group and position them there. Having your middle one in the center of the world. Now, outside, create a null for that group (group -> group utilities -> create group null) and do the rotation with the null so you won’t risk rotating some other property.
Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com