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I just wanted to update this thread with what I hope is the final solution:
After the battery continued to discharge itself at an abnormally high rate while sitting, I took the Box into Hergesheimer in Lake Forest, CA. I had not dealt with them before, but they really seemed to know what they were doing and treated me very well. They hooked up the car to the computer and got 3 or 4 pages of diagnostic errors! Later it turned out that most were due to the fact that I had disconnected the front trunk light when I was going through my diagnostic process. The fact that the light was disconnected completely confused the car's computer, which kept it using far more power than it should have been. Hergesheimer load tested the battery (the new Interstate) and tested the alternator, and both are fine. Nothing definitive could be found to be wrong with the car. They cleared all of the error codes. In the end it appears that when the first battery died, it created an error code in the computer that never cleared. The disconnected front light bulb created more computer confusion that increased the idle current draw. Additionally , the replacement battery may not have been fully charged when I got it.
I now have the car on a battery tender. It showed that it was charging the battery for about 24 hours and now it is in maintenance mode, so that looks good. Hopefully that is the end of the story.
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