Windows XP, Windows 7, and Word 2003 dysfunctionality

Just an observation;

I cannot replicate your problems under Word 2007 or Word 2010 installed on both Win7 & Win8

Sounds like you do not have the abominable "Click and Type" facility enabled.

If you really must, selection Options from the Tools menu and go to the Edit tab and check the box for Enable click and type.

The function of Ctrl+Shift+F9 (Unlink Field) has not changed in any version of Word.  It does not "remove" whatever was displayed by a field; rather it converts it to ordinary text so that it will no long act as a field.

Also AFAIK, Office 97 or 2000 will run under Windows 7.  No doubt, given the age of the applications, it is not an installation for which Microsoft provide support.

If my suggestions are not what you are talking about then I cannot replicate the issues here when using Word 2003 running under Windows 7

In order to use "click and type," you must double-click in a blank area of the document. Full rundown at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/about-click-and-type-HP005257639.aspx.

If Ctrl+Shift+F9 is not unlinking fields for you, then check the Customize Keyboard dialog to make sure that it is still assigned to that function.

1. I uninstalled all versions of Word (97, 2000 and 2003) and then reinstalled Word 2003 to test my theory that Word 2003 may be malfunctioning in the environment of its predecessors. No luck. Both problems persisted.
2. I installed all of Microsoft Works 2003 against the possibility that Word 2003 does not work well on a standalone basis and requires some component elswhere in the suite. No dice.
   
3. On my DVD I found Office 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and upgraded the program in hopes that "stability and performance improvements" in SP2 would eliminate the problems. No luck with either problem.
   
4. Against the possibility that there is something wrong with my DVD (though it has a product key and appears otherwise authentic), I went to Microsoft's website and found a full-dress version of SP2 and downloaded that, thinking that it might address such a problem. It did not.
   

I installed all of Microsoft Works 2003 against the possibility that Word 2003 does not work well on a standalone basis and requires some component elswhere in the suite. No dice.

Did you mean Microsoft Office 2003?

In anticipation of the switch, and having a copy of Word 2003, I installed the program on my XP system to familiarize myself with it.

Here are the two glitches:

First, when I left-click on an empty space within a document in an attempt to activate the blinking cursor, the program does not produce the cursor but instead selects the line of text nearest to the click point. If I use the up and down manual cursor keys, the selection function grabs a line above or below the initial line, as the case may be. In order to restore the blinking cursor I have to click within a line of text or click the right arrow on my keyboard. This problem has nothing to do with the EXT function indicated on the status bar, which is the diagnosis I've seen in forum discussions. That function can be turned on and off in my program, and the problem exists even when EXT is off. I have also conformed my selection options (under Tools > Options > Edit) to those of my friend and got no relief on that basis. In particular, this is not a "smart select" problem. 

http://www.howtogeek.com/148785/how-to-create-a-test-lab-so-that-you-can-follow-the-geek-school/

Our Geek School articles can get pretty complicated, and there’s no reason to do a ton of crazy stuff on your own desktop PC. Instead, you can just VirtualBox like we do to create virtual machines for all of your testing. Here’s how to do it.

You can even network multiple virtual machines together, so as long as you have a decent amount of RAM in your PC, you can fully test a scenario without messing with your PC’s settings at all.  It’s a much safer way to learn!

Before we get started there are a few things that we will  need:

• A copy of VirtualBox which can be obtained here.
• A Windows 7 ISO which can be obtained here.
• A Windows Server 2008 R2 ISO which can be obtained here.