Tech questions

I know I'm only a technological whiz to people who still don't know what snopes and google are, so please cut me some slack.

Two tech questions:

Gmail:

Is there any way to make gmail stop doing the threaded-message thing, short of cutting and pasting what you want from one message into the bottom of a new message? I'd like to keep a particular business conversation with a gmail address of mine, but the threaded thing means I can't find what I want just by looking at the message RE lines - they get too thready.

In other words, I want it to be a little more like yahoo mail, for now.

Word, Tables:
I use a medium-sized table to track the in/out, date, re line of stuff crossing my desk. Lately, the table has been deciding that it should make itself "autofit," for no reason that I can find. It's driving me crazy. I do not want to use Excel. I want Word, I just want it to STOP the autofit that I am not asking it to do. Any ideas how to make it [column sizing] STAY the way I have set it to begin with?

Help, anyone?