Thanks you,
I have actually tried disabling features not available in
97 and resaving the document as a 97 rtf.
Also the color I am using is 10% Gray scale. This color
was an option in 97.  
The one strange thing I have found is if I do to tools
options General Tab and select show blue background with
whit text the boxes are shaded white as though the
formatting exist, but it doesn't show up under normal
color settings regardless of the view. Normal, Page, Print
ect....