How to get out of Office 2000

OK. Everyone but me loves Office 2K. No one but me wants it gone. I removed it & re-installed Office 97, but Outlook won’t work, and spell check is still looking for Word 2K. It has more hooks than should be legal, & Microsoft won’t allow its removal. They would call it bad programming if they hadn’t done it. Does anyone know how, short of formatting & re-loading Windows, to get rid of this BAD software? I deleted the directory it left. I hunted through the registry. It just won’t die!!! I have never had a program do more damage! This is our future??? HELP!!!