Socket.IO and AngularJS creates multiple connections, how to stop?

I'm developing a realtime socket.io app using AngularJS, Nodejs, and Socket.io both the server and client side libraries. I'm using the module called angular-socket-io however when I tell Angular to connect, the more I refresh the page it seems like multiple connections keep being maintained with Socket.IO and I'm the only user on the page right now.

In my server logs I keep seeing many socket IDs print out and when I refresh the application page, it takes a while for it to reconnect. Watching the console I see it communicating with the server a lot (probably has to do with the multiple socket connection handshakes) but after a good minute or two, it finally stabilizes and starts receiving data again.

I think I'm doing this wrong, or is this normal? Does anyone have any good advice for using Socket.IO in angular so that when the page refreshes it reconnects once and gets rid of all previous connections so that only one is maintained at all times?

Here's some code samples. Just to clarify, the btford.socket-io prefixes all forwarded socket events with "socket:". So in my example it would be "socket:start".

myApp.js

angular.module('myApp', [ 'btford.socket-io', 'myControllers' ])
.config([ 'socketProvider', function(socketProvider) {
    var appSocket = io.connect('http://live.myapp.com');
    socketProvider.ioSocket(appSocket);
}])
.run(['socket', function(socket) {
    socket.forward('error');
    socket.forward('start'); // this is the event i'm trying to listen for
});

myController

angular.module('myControllers').controller('startController', [
    '$scope', 
    function($scope) {
         $scope.$on('socket:start', function(ev, data) {

    $scope.activeDrivers.push({
        name: data.user.firstName + " " + data.user.lastName
    });

    $scope.driversActiveTab.count = $scope.activeDrivers.length;
     });
    }
]);

So that's it, and I can't figure out why it keeps making so many connections to the server! Thanks for the help in advance!