I would be very surprised if you can still buy Word 97 except on places like Fleabay, but if you have the CDs that came with the PC I would have thought one of them will have Word on it. Vista (and Windows 7) are operating systems so the CD never has a word processor, spreadsheet or whatever on it.
Not sure who said that Word 2010 is no good though unless it was someone saying that everything Microsoft is cr*p. I know lots of people using it, though the ribbon can be a bit tricky to start with for users of older versions.