I upgraded to Snow Leopard on my Mac and as described on Apple’s website Parallels 3.0 won’t start on Snow Leopard. At least not by default. However it is possible to start Parallels 3.0 under Snow Leopard without updating anything. As there are some good reasons given, that lead to this result, use the following steps at your own risk. I haven’t experienced any problems with these steps, but who knows?

So here is what you need to do.

1. Open Parallels in Applications folder.
2. Choose “Show Package Contents” from the context menu
3. Go to “Contents”->”MacOS”
4. Open the located binary “Parallels”

A Terminal will open and start Parallels Desktop as in Leopard. I also put a photo set on flickr, showing all steps.

Appendix

If you want to have a shortcut in your Dock, you can simply drag the binary into it.