Installing ArcView 3 on 64-bit Windows?

Install Arcview on XP, using the defaults. Copy these folders to the same location on Win7.

C:\esri
C:\Program Files\Common Files\ESRI

For 64bit Windows use target C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\ESRI instead.

For Win7/64: Copy all the files from a working installation. Put them into identically named drives and folders on the destination machine. Run it! This really does work: I have been using AV 3.3 in this mode for the last eight months. This is the fourth or fifth migration of this sort since the last official install I did about a decade ago. Also working is Spatial Analyst 1.1, which I have not installed from CD in about 14 years.

I also tried the Windows VM solution (which emulates Win XP/32). It's awful: there's some kind of incompatibility that causes AV to hang after a fraction of a second and wait for user interaction. If you keep waving your mouse over the window, it will keep chugging away at a redraw or table processing, but it's still incredibly slow. After hunting the Web for a few weeks to locate a solution, to no avail, I gave up on this kluge.

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If you have problems with reports of missing DLL files after the migration, please see this answer by klewis for a potentially simple fix. You might also need to migrate special files installed by your ArcView extensions if they placed them in idiosyncratic locations.

After installing via the other answers, there are couple of things to make things a little friendlier (on Win7):

Register the .apr filename extension so you can just 2x-click on SomeProject.apr and thereby bypass the painful AV3 file chooser. Run these command from an administrative command prompt (edit to suit, see ss64 for usage):

assoc .apr=ArcView3.Project
ftype ArcView3.Project=C:\ESRI\ARCVIEW\BIN32\arcview.exe "%1"

Install Windows Help Program (WinHlp32.exe) from Windows Update KB917607, assuming you want to read the AV3 help docs that is.