Sounds like an allergy of some type, something like you'd take an antihistamine to get rid of. Maybe you do have a sensitivity to one of the ingredients.
Your medium must absolutely not be wet - it encourages rot, and also inhibits root growth because the roots don't need to "seek out" moisture in a wet medium. Only tiny amounts of light are necessary at first also - you don't want to encourage loads of photosynthesis particularly to grow roots...
Cloning isn't something that's difficult, just follow any of the established techniques and it works just fine. You need to sort out your lights, environment, and get some decent media and nutrients as a minimum rather than starting loads of clones off happily that then don't do anything.