I found that the best way to deal with the positioning issue is setting one of the 3 axis values to a number like 0.0000000001. The nodepath when set to this value, fixes 2 problems. One: the physics works again; Two: Nodes, when parented to the he path, return with LPoint3f(0, 0, 0) when using the getPos() function. This means no interaction is needed with positioning child nodes.