OK everyone. I have been corresponding with Smith Micro and have learned that P8 has a known issue with having more than one runtime that starts with the same name.
What this means is that if you, like me, imported your p7 runtime using the "add library" option and you now have both a Poser 7 library and a Poser 8 library it will cause problems.
The tech at SM said the following:

"There is a known issue in which Poser 8 experiences problems if there are is more than one runtime that begins with the same word. In this case, you have two runtimes that begin with the word "Poser" (Poser 7 and Poser 8). The engineers are working on a fix for this, but a temporary workaround is to change the names of the directories so that the directory containing the Runtime folder does not begin with the same word as any other one.

So, for example, you can rename your C:Program Filese frontierPoser 7 folder to C:Program Filese frontierA Poser 7. That way, one runtime is named "A Poser 7" and the other is named "Poser 8" so that both runtimes don't begin with "Poser". You will need to re-link your "A Poser 7" runtime back into the Poser 8 library, but after doing so, that should hopefully resolve your issue."