As a matter of fact, as taketounwanted has illustrated today, swapping out to a page file causes problems more often than having no page file to which to swap. In my case, when I first got ProTools, I didn't follow the recommendation to disable PFs, and my sessions would hang up (like a 1 minute process taking 20 minutes or more) and crash all the time. I disabled them, and, VOILA, no more hangups or crashes.
Come to think of it, could MAFs simply be a result of this same issue (trying to divvy up and swap out portions of data that are driving an active process)?