Well, the short answer is YES.

I've seen the issue discussed over at 3dBuzZ before, but their search engine's crashing at the moment, so I can't point you to the thread.

Just found this via google: Alias: Qualification of Maya 7.0 on OSs

From memory, it seems to come down to individual setups. While one person will claim that XP64 and maya 7.0 are best buddies, another will say they hate each other.

Can't say anything about Vista64 yet though, that's something I know nothing about.

Something worth thinking about are what extra features/functionality would a 64bit OS give you (other than the ability to run 64 bit specific apps) If you've already got XP32 it may well worth be sticking with it for a while yet. Unless maya is designed for a 64Bit OS, even if you put in more than 4GB of ram, maya will still only 'see' 4GB as this is the limit of 32 bit memory addressing. (2^32 = 4294967296, which is 4GB)

But if you can borrow a copy and have a spare hour or two, wouldn't hurt to try temporarily, I suppose. Just backup first or use on old drive, just to be safe. Then buy it (64bit windows) if it works okay for you.

S.