Is your solution after evaporating the alcohol sticky to the touch?
I've seen that a number of times. That could be any of several gakks. It could be PEG, or hypromellose, or one of the newer polymers, or a mix of them. When you have a polymer with the pseudo that impedes crystal formation, you will probably find acetone flashing to be of little help. Some of these gakks are soluble in acetone, and pseudo HCl is fairly soluble in the gakky acetone.
One approach to cleaning the pseudo is to dissolve it in 91% IPA and follow Fester's hydrolysis method using KOH to clean the pseudo. This works.
Another alternative is to do a MEK flash of the dried pseudo. Put the evap dish under a heat lamp, in the sun on a hot dry day, in an attic, or on low heat in an oven-- whatever it takes to give you a warm, very dry environment. Dry the pseudo mixture completely dry. As it dries, crystals will form in the gel. Keep drying. Dry until the pseudo is cloudy and whitish/yellowish. It will no longer be clear. You do not want any clear areas left or any area that feels sticky or oily. Bake the gel dry. This doesn't require high heat. It takes a little patience.
When the pseudo is very dry, and while the pan is still very warm (you should alomost need a hot pad to hold it) flash with an excess of MEK. (Yes, dry the MEK first.) Use enough MEK to cover the pseudo to a depth of 4-5 mm or even a little more. Rock the pan, moving the MEK around in it, washing the pseudo loose from the glass. Use a gloved finger or a spatula or razor blade to loosen any pseudo stuck to the glass. Mash up any clumps. The MEK will pull a yellow color from the pseudo, leaving white flakes of pseudo. Pan the pseudo to a corner of the pan and decant the MEK. Add fresh MEK deep enough to cover the pseudo, put it on low heat and allow it to simmer with a little stirring and mashing for five to ten minutes. No need to boil the MEK. Pan the pseudo to a corner of the pan and decant the MEK.
If you use acetone rather than MEK, you will get a little clean pseudo, but most of the yield will dissolve in the gakked acetone again. For some reason pseudo doesn't seem to dissolve in gakky MEK the way it will in gakky acetone. After the MEK rinse, try to recrystallize the pseudo. It should recrystallize now. You don't want to react pseudo that won't recrystallize.
You could also do a "xylene clean." Dissolve the pseudo in alcohol, filter the solution, then precipitate the pseudo in a mixture of xylene and naptha by heating to boil off the alcohol. Filter the precipitated pseudo out of the solvent while the solvent is still hot. Do not wait. Take it off the hotplate and pour it through a filter right then. Rinse immediately with MEK. The pseudo precip technique using xylene and naptha does a good job on PEG. The xylene helps if polysorbate 80 or hypromellose is the contaminant. Filtering while the solvent is still hot is the key to the cleaning method. If the solvent cools even a few degrees other substances will precipitate in the solvent, and you will filter these out with the pseudo.
None of these methods replaces the cleaning done by dual solvent recrystallization. You may need one of them to get the pseudo clean enough to recrystallize.
Give the MEK a try. It costs more than acetone and stinks like hell, but what works, works. And that is what counts here. It won't solve all your problems, but it may solve some of them.