I don’t have any trouble resizing live traced objects using the normal methods. Is it a really complex result?

it seems to work as any other object for me. CLick and drag the corner points (hold shift to keep proportions).

when i do that it just moves the whole box

Have you expanded it?

no, is that my problem?

It may be, go to ‘object’ and ‘expand appearance’ that should enable you to resize individual parts of it.

it doesn’t let me click that.

i clicked expand and then it let me tweak one corner, but no matter what i can’t resize

do you have the black arrow or the white arrow selected?

Have you tried entering a % in the scale tool (by double clicking it)?

the scale tool worked! thanks.

so you have to go to the tool bar to resize?

much different from cs.

Not generally, I’m not sure why it’s not working for you. Make sure you have the black arrow selected and I would play about holding the alt and/or shift key and dragging the corner anchor (the cursor should change to show two arrow heads), as it should work and is easier, if less accurate, than the scale tool.

Have you hidden the bounding box maybe?
Hit ctrl+shift+b to show it.