"Unfortunately I do believe that many new computers come with all your stuff on one partition in one hard drive."

This is sadly true, fortunately there are good utilities that can fix this :) For that matter, in most circumstances WindowsXP can be used to adjust partition sizes on it's own.

Of course, the first thing I do when I set up a new box is format it anyway. It's much less painful than doing it later.

"I am thinking that when we tell Windows what to do with the swap file, we might be causing problems."

It's possible, but in my case I know it's not what happened. I track my system memory usage and under 2000 I had plenty of swap space left when poser said this. This is almost certainly a Poser bug.

"I've seen this whole subject debated a lot, and it still comes out that we don't always know better than the operating system."

The operating system does not make particularly complex decisions on this... it will grow the swap file up to a mandated limit at need. Swap space needs are fairly easily monitored and predicted.