I just added a note to your earlier posting .. I think that you need to resolve your problems there before trying to migrate to FM8 .. most likely you'll see the same error in FM8.

To answer your questions ..
- yes, FM7 books/files can be opened in FM8 without problems
- yes, FM7 books/files should look the same when printed from FM8
- you *may* be able to compile your FDK7 API with the FDK8 libraries .. in general it works, but you may need to make some tweaks. The bigger issue will be problems that arise from the compiler version .. FDK8 requires that you use VS 2005. However, you should be able to load your FDK7 DLLs directly in FM8 without recompiling .. in general, this can be done without problems. The main reason to recompile using the new libraries is if you want to take advantage of new features (such as Unicode).

You can download the FM8 trial and give it a whirl. But .. I do think that you'll need to resolve the fundamental reason for the crash before it'll work in FM8 .. unless it was an actual bug that was fixed in FM8.

....scott