318 Motor, please help

im actually going to purchase a tach hopefully this weekend. in park it's idling a little higher than i like to hear.....if i had to guess the idle in park is around 1000-1200, when i drop it into drive the RPM's go way down for a moment and then evens out where i would say about 800. my original guess a while back was a vacuum leak where the intake meets the heads but i sprayed around the perimeter with carb cleaner and there was no RPM change
Engines will often idle fine but have problems when in gear. When going into gear, there is a load on the engine so it needs to make more power to handle that. I would suspect your timing is a bit too retarded so you might want to loosen the distributor and move it slightly counter clockwise. That will raise the idle speed some so you might want to adjust that. If that helps, you might want to move the distributor a little more until it no longer stalls going into gear. All it takes is a little change like this to make your engine happy.

Did it run well before changing your points? If the dwell is not set properly the engine will run poorly. Newer point & condenser sets are of questionable quality so just because it is new does not mean it is good.

By the way, the power valve # may be too low. Rule of thumb is to start the PV rating at 2 inches below cruise vacuum and adjust #'s as needed. Based on what you said, I would try an 8.5. The old myth of running a PV at 1/2 of seen vacuum is just that.