Hey is there some way to disable the light management system for dynamic lights? what I need is the old style method (a6, a7) where there are just 8 lights sorted by distance to the view. Currently it sets of light positions by each light's effect on particular meshes... I want it relative to the view,

Probably not what you want to hear but you could write that yourself (in case you don't figure it out with the system as-is).
I'd ignore all A8 light properties/ members/ functions then and code it from the ground up (picking different names has the advantage that you save CPU resources and not have your stuff overwritten by acknex).
A light struct (position, color, range, on/ off), then a loop over all lights which does camera frustum per frame. There you set analog array data to be used in the shader (such as vecMyLightPos[8], ...).
Create a custom light.fx to be included in your shaders for light calculations or change the functions in code/default.fx which reference vecLightPos and similar.

I basically went ahead and did something like you suggest...its for a point light shadow mapping system.. now I have 8 lights with shadow maps working ….