If you already know Autocad LT, I'd stick to that and look into a student version for non-commercial use. Acad has really come a long way since '97 so ...
If you want to give your current LT97 a shot, try right-clicking on the icon and then left-clicking on 'run as administrator' and see if it works. That is the go-around I had to use on a Vista machine prior to the release of Acad 2008.
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Jeff
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