And I'm embarrassed to say that the big "revelation" didn't come until I was about to start the TOE shaping!! 
See the big ugly "splotch" on my sock? Well, so did I. Ewwww. But I kept going. Hello? Anybody have any smart pills??
This didn't happen on the first sock I made, but I just kept knitting along and then decided to "cut" (which I HATE to do on socks!) and reattach the yarn to break up some of the pooling (ahem, 3 or 4 times -see the piles of yarn on the couch?). All in all it was still looking pretty ugly.
Then all of a sudden....it dawned on me: "COUNT THE STITCHES".
I knit my socks magic loop style now and I knit different stitch counts depending on the yarn. For this sock I used 64 sts and therefore should've had 32 on both needles to proceed down the foot. Well, I had 36 on one and 32 on the other. Yea, you see where this is going. It's amazing what havoc 4 extra stitches can cause. 
Out of probably 30 or so pairs of socks I've made so far, and my experiences in the past with changing cast-on's due to ugly pooling, this was the first time I totally messed up on the gusset decreases! You'd think it would've dawned on me SOONER to consider WHY it was pooling so bad!
It's kind of funny NOW when I think about how long it took me to figure this out. But I wasn't laughing yesterday when I realized what I'd done and started tinking back 40 plus rows.... 
Now I'm back on track. At least I hope so.....
