HDR image used for Cube and texture?

Hiya. I have a setup where I want to use my HDR as a cube (for the sky lighting and BG) and also as a standard texture.

Since I have to convert the hdr to Cube to acknowledge the range and shape, is ther a way post that to convert it to a 8bit/16bit texture I can apply to geometry and standard shaders .

I have a shader that does the panoSpherical projection onto geo, but wont accept a cube mapped hdr. At the moment I get around it by opening the hdr up in photoshop, converting to 16bit, and saving as psd ..then that works..but now have 2 hi res images in my scene.

Any ideas?

Cheers
-P