K, so I bought a new set of wires yesterday. I measured all the resistance readings and one wire has 10,000ohms while all the others have between 800ohms and 1800ohms.

What is really strange (and I tried this with two different meters) is that the number begins to rise as I keep the meter attached to the wire in question. If I let go and attach again, the number will continue where it left off - if I wait a bit, the ohm reading will fall to a lower rating....but will start rising again with the meter attached. WTF!

Can anyone explain this??

 

You've got a lot of capacitance in that wire, which usually means you have a break in the spiral conductor somewhere. I'd take them all back and demand a replacement, since the break will only get worse. That's the danger of using wound or solid wires - they're a lot more fragile. Unless you're running a lot of compression and need insanely high voltage to initiate a spark, you might want to consider a carbon filament resistance wire, like Packard or Blue Streak/MSW (not MSD). They usually go 100K miles without failure.