The 97 Professional Edition opens to normal layout view, with two toolbars and one menu bar at the top of your screen. 2000 Standard opens to print layout view, which is more visually pleasing, with one menu and one toolbar. This can be altered with a bit of tweaking. Those of us who have to work with text-only documents prefer using Word. The reason is quite simple.
Word tolerates the lack of features in such documents.
That becomes a headache when you have to continually fight with a word processor to maintain your original format. I also believe Word works a bit smoother with Windows. The updates and patches do not seem to be as frequent or as large. One of the nicest new features in Word 2000 is the collect and paste feature. Now you can grab multiple items for one-click pasting from your clipboard.