lanux128: yup, you can safely delete pagefile.sys without any problems, once you've turned it off.
nudone: it's pretty hard to benchmark the effects... especially if you have a lot of RAM and fast harddrives. I still feel better knowing that windows won't do any useless paging even if I can't feel much of a difference on my current machine... back when I only had 1 gig of RAM, more paging was done, and I had a slow(er) harddrive - I believe I could feel the difference there, under certain load scenarios. But I have no idea how you'd go about benchmarking a thing like this. (Sure, you can watch the pagefile usage statistics and draw graphs etc., but that doesn't tell you much about how much "perceived sluggishness" there is, unless the stats are really bad).