Well, as I said, i'd put a different meter on it. I used a fancy fluke meter from work and had it monitor the max current draw overnight to see what was draining the battery. After waiting for the van to go into sleep mode, i set the meter to record max and average current draw for roughly 8 hours. Here are the results:
99mA max
26mA average
I wasn't sure what caused the spike, but i wasn't too concerned given that the average was low.
Soooooooooooo, after this little excercise, i came to the conclusion that excessive current draw was NOT my problem (although the van wouldn't turn over after that night). So i took the battery back to Sears (where it came from less than 1 year ago!) and they said it was NO GOOD. Brought new battery home (free btw), installed, haven't had a problem since! So, the moral of the story..........don't assume that your battery is good just because it's only a year old! Some lessons are learned the hard way, but i suppose that's better than learning nothing at all.
