Hello , im a Houdini noob and am trying out the biped auto rig. After scaling the rig i am trying to move the joints in the proper position. When trying to move the joiints on the x z or y axis it just sticks and wont budge. It does move on the xy or yz ect though . Im missing something.

I attached my hip file.

Just set aside the auto rig, that has been depreciated in favor of the new character rigs available in H15.5.

Either way, the rigs are controlled via the parameters panel for the rig node itself (/obj level). Did you notice all those rotates and translates for arms and legs? That's how you do it. Animate those parameters, not the objects in the viewport.

the auto rig tools are deprecated and should be avoided.

so it took a few minutes but we figured out what is happening here, and it has to do with the scale.
there is a tolerance amount that the handle checks for - if the handle is moved less than this tolerance then the handle ignores the movement.
so at your character scale of 0.001 the handles are just ignoring your actions - this is/maybe a bug - I'll log it now. ID=76934

why is your character so tiny?
what I would suggest is to scale your geometry up to something reasonable - human scale ~= 180cm (1.8 Houdini Units)
then adjust the rig
capturing geometry and painting skin weights will be much easier at a normal scale also.

then once the rig is made you can scale the character down for your needs.

I think where i went wrong with the scale is i thought the smallest squares in the ortho grid represented 1 meter.

If were not to use the Auto rig, which tools do we use to replace it ? I looked under the character shelf and only saw rigs already captured to characters.

the easiest thing to do to estimate scale is to drop down a box - and rest it on the grid - that is 1 meter.

you'd build the rig from scratch - dive inside the simplemale or simplefemale to see how.