I wonder why the max size options were removed from XP? I guess it must expand it automatically, or something.
I don't think Win 9x had then either; I remember windows 95 was literally limited to 64K of something.... I looked it up, each key could only have 64K on each value.
For swap/page files, meh, I just let the system take care of it. I have 8GB of RAM so I could probably get by without one. (my last machine "only" had 1GB, and I had virtual memory turned off completely). Right now it's system managed so I have a 8GB pagefile; excessive I suppose but hey, I have plenty of space to go around.
From what I understand though Windows needs at least a certain minimum amount of virtual memory or it can only handle larger size blocks; I know for windows 3.1 regardless of how much RAM you had it was never a good idea to shut off the swap file, since without it windows could only deal with memory in 64K chunks, rather then 4K pages. I think this was true of Win 9x as well. Not sure how it translates to the NT line though.