2) If you have multiple swap files over several disks, then the slowest performing disk will be you bottle neck due that windows will utilize the sum of all swap files as one memory paging file.
If there is more than one swapfile, Windows will use the one where a disk operation is not going on at the moment. So it is kind of the same principal as a RAID-0 setup where you are writing to two disks at the same time thus speeding the total write speed. Yes, the slowest disk will be where it writes the slowest but it is still faster to write to it than to wait for the end of a write operation on the disk and only then write to the swapfile. If you have a ridiculously slower drive (when compared to the others) then you should take it out of the mix. I'm trying to be brief here.
3) If you have several disks and can set partitions, then set a partition for a temp file of about 10 gigs which can be cleaned and defragged on every reboot, a partition for your paging file fore going the dump. Separate partitions for Windows/Programs and one for data then redirect your "My Documents" to that drive.
Partitions are good to speed up defragmentation jobs but they will not speed up the total write speed for file writes if it is located on the same drive. If the HD card is busy writing to a partition on drive "X" and you attempt simultaneously to write to a different partition on drive "X" it will have to poll both operations (and actually loose time compared to sequentially writing to the first partition and upon finishing to the other partition because the HD head is traveling back and forth farther apart as partitions are physically sequential on a disk). In fact you can only get faster speeds if you are writing to different physical drives which are on their own IDE or SATA slot. Each IDE slot is composed of a dual-channel bus which allows you to put 2 HDs but they are really sharing the same bus so the card will loose some time because you can't use the data bus simultaneously for both. There is a potential situation where a partition just for the swapfile on the same physical disk will be a good strategy -> when using a dynamic swapfile size. When using a dynamic swapfile size it will be faster for the system to dynamically rearrange the swapfile if it is close together and not subject to defragmentation (all true when it's on its own partition). But you want to avoid that in the first place as dynamically resizing the swapfile is a big performance hit. It was a trade-off between performance and using less space for the swapfile but in these days where HD space is cheap you don't care about any longer about a swapfile that is bigger.
These are things that I have done and found to work efficiently and not widely found procedures on the myriad of boards with the "canned" statements.
I hope you're not implying that I simply posted a canned suggestion. I use these guidelines myself with very satisfactory results and I know a little of what I'm talking about.
cheers