Maya Modeling :: Trumpet - Verts Are All Yellow

I am trying to model a trumpet in Maya 2012. I took a cylinder and started selected the verts on one side to extrude and they were all yellow. When I extruded and then stretched the new edge to make the bell of the trumpet, it expanded but so did the other edge loops. Also, anytime I try to select a single or multiple verts, others are arbitrarily selected. In terms of a clock, if I select 1 o'clock, the 5 o'clock point will be selected. I don't know why but verts can only be selected symmetrically. This problem is also causing many other stranger control problems that are hard to explain. For example, when I extrude, I can drag out the new face if I use the default extruding moving tool (with the move tool and the scale tool on top of one another), but if I click "w" to get to the move tool like I usually do after I extrude, and drag it out, it completely forgets that the extrude ever happened, and just moves the single edge loop I had before. Every forum I've found said to just click "b" to turn off soft-selection, which fixed the original problem of having my shapes have redish orange edges, but the yellow verts are still there.