Shade 9 and poser 8 can work together.

[Bowring]

It seems that shade 9 does not work with poser 8 out of the box but it can be persuaded.
If you have an old installation of poser 7 on the computer, copy/paste the file
poser.dta
from the poser 7 directory to the poser 8 directory (there is no file with a .dta extension in poser 8 it seems).
I have done this and PoserFusion now recognizes the poser 8 installation and will import poser files created in poser 8. By a happy accident my poser 7 to 8 upgrade turned out to be a full install so I had both versions to play with.
I don't think this is against any copyright as I own both releases of poser.
Thanks to juanmanuel for giving the clue in an old PoserFusion thread.
Hope this saves someone a little time and effort.
By the way this is in Mac OS X.

[juanmanuel]

This also works with Poserpro, btw. Just make sure you don't overwrite anything when doing things like this, you never know what Pandora's box you could open otherwise.