NT cannot run without virtual memory, period.
Nope, NT and its derivatives can all have VM disabled.
... In XP, it's under System Properties -> Advanced -> Performance Settings -> Advanced -> Change -> 'No Paging File' -> Set -> OK, then reboot.
Disabling the backing store for virtual memory is not the same as disabling virtual memory. You are disabling paging of virtual memory, not virtual memory.
Disabling paging just means that the amount of virtual memory in use cannot grow beyond the number of physical pages. (It may appear that more is in use than physical memory, but that's because some shared pages are counted more than once.)
"Virtual memory" fundamentally means that the memory address seen by a program for an object is not the same as the actual physical memory address. Two programs can read an integer at address 0x0056EFAC and get different results - because the two programs have different physical addresses for the same virtual address. Memory protection (something that classic Mac OS lacked) is part of virtual memory - programs cannot corrupt each others' memory because they do not share physical addresses, even though they are using the same virtual addresses.
Virtual memory also has the big advantage that contiguous virtual memory does not need to be contiguous in physical memory. A large request for contiguous virtual memory can be created by using a lot of fragmented physical pages. No need to restart to clean up free memory so that a program can be loaded.
Most of these features of virtual memory are required for NT to run. It is not necessary to have a pagefile so that memory in use can exceed the actual physical RAM - but disabling the pagefile has no effect on the other features of virtual memory. Someone with a classic Mac OS mindset might call this "disabling virtual memory", but that is quite incorrect.
(see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory for a much more thorough explanation)
(obviously only when I know there is sufficient physical RAM present for my needs; as what would normally be a request to enlarge the page file likely becomes a system crash with VM off.)
Whatever little bit of speed you might gain will quickly be offset by a system or application crash caused by running out of memory.
Most experts advise to not remove the pagefile (see
If I have a Windows XP machine that has lots of memory, can I improve performance by removing the pagefile?).
In my experience, on memory rich machines I declare the pagefile to have an initial size of 16 MiB, and let it grow to several GiB. Windows will usually reclaim pages from cache rather than expanding the pagefile. In any event, I never need to worry about a failure because I didn't make the right guess about memory usage.