Office 97 Pro not opening in separate windows

Hi,

I'm new to this and hope this will be displayed here correctly.

I am using Windows XP Home with SP2 and have been using Office 97 Pro for many years without any problems. Recently I did a full reinstall of XP together with SP2, download and installed all the latest updates as well as latest update for Antivirus and Firewall. After reinstalling Office 97, I now find that I am not able to open two or three Office Words 97 or Excel 97 documents at the same time so that I can compare the entries in them by reducing/restore down the size of one of them, open the other and have the restored down dieplaying on top of the second doc, which I was able to do before the reinstall. Now it keep opening up one document on top of the other and only one document can be viewed at any one time.

I have Google searched several places for the last few weeks for a fix and having tried the only one or two not too clear instructions, it was usuccessful. There isn't any others I can find. I am only an average user and do not understand much and get nervous when it comes to editing anything major in the registry, but will, if necessary and if it's not too complicated, to get rid of this annoying problem. I use Excel 97 alot and need different documents to open in its own windows so that I can compare the figures in each documents.

Any help and suggestions will be greatly greatly appreciated so that I can again open each documents in its own separate windows. Many thanks.

Slickcondo