>Excel97 will not recognize and convert my old MS Works v3.0 worksheets. Anybody have any ideas?
I see Excel 95 has a MS Works 2.0 converter. Did you upgraded from 95 or only have 97? I don't suppose you still have MS-Works, because you may be able to write it in some text format and import that into Excel.

Is this things that make you say 'Backward compatibility my a**!'.