At present, the only way to tell if Classic is running or not is to open the System Prefs panel and look at the Classic pane, or double-click a Classic app and see if Classic launches. In response to a question on the X4U mailing list, David Nelson created a very slick little AppleScript that answers the question in a much nicer way. With his permission, I'm reposting the script here.
Open ScriptEditor and paste in the following lines:
-- Start ScriptYou could skip the commented lines, obviously. After creating the script, select "Save as Run-Only" from the File manu and change the format to "Application" and save the script.
tell application "Finder"
if (name of (every application process)) contains "Classic Support" then
say "Classic is running."
else
say "Classic is not running."
end if
end tell
-- End Script
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20011208102113321