Here is one definition from a Win 2000 paper:

"Memory: Page faults/sec—Page faults happen when a program tries to use memory that's part of its working set and can't find it. Page faults come in two varieties: hard and soft. Hard page faults occur when the needed page must be loaded from the hard disk. Soft page faults happen when a program is found somewhere else in memory other than where the program expected to find it."

I believe the XP Kernel was written to use the page faults in the "Prefetch" process during boot up and application start, so at least some benefits can be gained from page faults and using the prefetch mechanism to decrease process slow downs due to hard drive head movements.

Not a coder, so that is about all I can list with anything resembling "intelligence".

This may help (or confuse) depending on your point of view http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?article=222

It would seem that Windows is doing a lot of work "behind the scenes" to keep everything as smooth as possible for the complete operation of the machines.

I agree.

There is nothing to be done for it. Programs that need to access information (pages) to work are bound to find that the processor (and prefetch) mechanism can't forsee all that the program may need. Not to mention that the startup of most processes are bound to need some paging to the hard drive.

In another article on servers, one technician pointed out that the longer you leave a machine running (and by extension the loaded processes), the more page faults will be seen.