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RE: Ground redundancy
Another thing to check is the dryer manual and warranty information. The manual could address this issue specifically and the warranty might be contingent on ground wire redundancy. I haven't actually seen a dryer that did (I don't know that I've read any dryer manual or warranty that closely), but it's worth checking.
Ground Is Important
I dunno ... maybe it depends on the appliance you're using. I for one have "felt" the effect of not having a ground with my computers. Korean apartments in Seoul were notorious for not having grounded wall connections. I noticed that if I touched my computer chassis lightly, I could "feel" vibrations through it (not from the HD BTW) that were not present when the same equipment was grounded. Furthermore, I noticed that if my skin made contact with it's metal corners ... I would receive an enormous shock and a very mild electrical burn.
Oddly, though, this only happened to a few people on the same equipment. Not everyone could "feel" the anomaly or the burn.
Electrical Engineers?
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Ground redundancy
I have some experience with wiring houses as an electrician's assistant (when I was in high school) and my impression on this issue is that it's really not that big of a deal to go without a ground wire. In the houses I helped wire, all of the white/neutral wires and the ground/bare wires from the house were connected to the same place (the ground rod) in the junction box. Your house might be different since it's older; you can check by taking off the cover panel of your junction box and seeing if the white and bare wires go back to the same place (usually one of two long manifold clamp-down apparatuses running the length of the box - one for white/neutral and bare/ground wires and one for the black/hot wires).
The idea for having two wires go back to the same place is redundancy, and I'm pretty sure that's something required by current code. I don't think the rest of your house is per code, though, with it being so old and considering that the dryer connection wasn't wired with a ground.
You could run a new ground wire, but that might be a big pain, depending on how your house is wired (i.e., does the wire go through the roof or under the house, etc.). If you can figure a way to access the necessary locations, however, you'd just have to either replace the existing wire with a modern dryer circuit wire (four wires instead of three), or leave the existing wire and run the ground wire by itself.
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