Blender 2.71 parenting objects transforms objects Whenever I parent an object it gets distorted or transformed in some form or fashion when I press "P" in game mode...is there a way to fix this? 

See the top picture shows what it supposed to look like...then I press "P" in game mode and we jump to the picture below and objects go megatron on me and are transformed.
Typically the scaling does not change when entering the game engine. This is different, when you are playing an animation or change something via Python.

My advice to you is to void scaling (especially the in-homogeneousscaling) at the parents. 

If you need scaled meshes, you can create the object tree by using empties as parent. You can parent the previous parent objects to the empties. This way they are no parents anymore and you can scale them without side effects. Just make sure the empties are not scaled.

Example:

Frame (scaled)
- Button A (scaled)
- Button B (scaled)


changed to:

Root (Unscaled Empty)
- Frame (scaled)
- Button A (scaled)
- Button B (scaled)


or

Root (Unscaled Empty)
- Frame (scaled)
- Button Base (Unscaled Empty)
  - Button A (scaled)
  - Button B (scaled)