8 million polys? You won't be animating that at all. It's not your PC. Maya isn't built to display millions of polys in the scene at once. Remove any extra edges and vertices that aren't needed. For example, a cube can have 60,000 faces; but they aren't needed! Remove them!

The general workflow to prep a model for texturing is the following:

1) Select all objects and delete their history.
2) Un-group all objects so that they aren't in a hierarchy.
3) Delete all left-over groups.
3) Merge all vertices and make sure all geometry and normals are correct.
4) Freeze the object's transforms.
5) Center the pivot on each object.
6) Create your final hierarchy, and parent the objects.
7) Freeze transforms and center the pivot on each group.

Your model should be good to go now. If you know how nodes are connected in Maya, you should also open up the hypergraph, and view each object's input and output connections, and blow away any other nodes that are there. Each object should only have a transform and a shape node.

Note: The reason why I say to blow away all groups, is that sometimes there are extra "transform1" groups left over after certain operations (separations, etc) This makes sure that your scene is entirely clean.