I can't give you guys links to documents, but I remember reading tech blogs written by Microsoft programmers that were saying it's best to leave the pagefile / swap enabled, even if set to something as low as 100 MB.
The reason for that was because inside the memory management code there are some "shortcuts" or tricks made to improve memory allocation and handling and those tricks or shortcuts work because the code knows if the attempt fails, there's always pagefile to fall back to and save the day, in those rare worst case scenarios .... with pagefile disabled, some of those algorithms default to "guaranteed always works" but they're much slower (use more cpu cycles to complete).
So basically, a program that allocates and destroys lots of memory even if it's small chunks of memory, may work a bit better (perform more operations per second, stuff like that), even if they never hit the page file, even if they only work with way less than the maximum memory installed in the system.
Maybe things have changes in the latest versions of Windows, and maybe with the modern processors that have 8 cores, 16 threads, and 4 Ghz+ frequencies, those extra cpu cycles don't matter that much anymore.
Still, it doesn't affect me in any way to leave some page file... Windows is often too eager to kill applications if it seems it's running out of memory.
For example, I had at some point pagefile locked to 256MB (fixed size) and 8 GB of RAM ... I was playing a game and alt-tabbed to a browser to read a walkthrough for the game.
The page was full of animated GIFs showing the route through the map of the game, and animated avatars for characters and so on ... at that point Firefox still kept the uncompressed GIFs in memory, so the page went up to 5 GB of memory usage from all the GIFs on the page and that made Windows ask to kill the game to make more room for memory.
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