Hi, If youre problem was caused by gimble lock then changin the rotation order of an object can often be a good solution (although never perfect). For instance...
If you create a box, scale it a bit and make it door shaped so you can see it rotating more clearly and leave the rotation order as XYZ. Rotate it in Y by 90 degrees, use the channel box for this whole explenation and not the gizmo or you wont get the desired effect. Now you want to make the box bank left and right, so rotate it in z. It doesnt work, instead the box pitches forward as if you were rotating it in X... This is your gimble lock, the Z axis has been "left behind" (cant think of a better way to say it) and the Y axis has overlapped it and so rotating them has the same effect. So change the rotate order to ZXY, this fixes the problem, rotate Z (in the channel box) and it works fine... BUT... set all the rotations back to zero (just for clarity), leave the rotation order as ZXY and rotate the box 90 degress in X, now rotate the box in the Y axis, you would expect the box to roll length ways (like rolling over in bed) but it doesnt, it does what we would expect rotating Z to do. Gimble lock again. This is the problem. One axis always gets kind of left behind leaving it open to being overlapped. In maya this axis is the last axis in the rotation order list, eg in 'XYZ' Z will get left behind, in 'ZXY' Y will get left behind and so on.
If you put the box in a gimble lock situation and then use the gizmo to rotate the "locked" axis you will notice that values jump in to the other axis to kind of compensate. This can cause all sorts of problems when your keyframing. Experiment with it with the box and youll see what i mean.
One solution to gimble lock can be to add an extra gimble control, which can be used in emergencies when nothing else solves the problem. Jason Schleiffers character rigging dvd has an excellent example of how to do this.
Its kind of a hard concept to explain so i hope that all makes sense
Happy animating 
