Ok, here's a new one on me.

I have two flash drives:
1 GB Lexar Jump Drive Lightning (I've had it for ~2 yrs)
2 GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro (I've had it for ~1 yr)

When I plug in the Lexar drive, Windows mounts it as a Local disk.
When I plug in the Cruzer drive, Windows mounts it as a Removable disk.

Has anyone else ran into this issue before?

It doesn't matter how i format these drives, they still mount the same way... ideas?

What drive letters are they coming up as in My Computer?
A potential cause is that if the 1Gb drive is coming up as Drive E (for example) and you previously had a Hard Drive as Drive E, then that could explain it.

In all honesty though, as long as you can write data to and from the drives and stop them before removing, I really wouldn't worry about it, minor cosmetic issue.

They both work fine, however I have ran into problems getting my lexar to be recognized on some older machines.

I help a lot of people around here (elderly community in the middle of Kansas) that have either no internet access for drivers or are running win98 (ie minimal driver support in windows for USB). I've found that i cannot use my lexar on those older machines. The only reasoning I can come to is the difference in the way window mounts them.

I really want to be able to run both drives regardless of machine i'm working on. what could be causing them to mount differently?

As per your previous idea, that was my first idea too. I've used disk management to change the drive letter/path for the drives and it doesn't change anything.

ideas?

I have a Kingston USB2.0 Data Traveler that shows up as "removable disk E" in My Computer but the dialogue box does not appear on my screen. I went into Options, then "add/remove hardware" it states that the datatraveler is in good working condition. I can not drag and drop any files to the removable disk. Help please! Any idea

as far as the lexar and windows 98 as long as it is 98se you need to download the driver and either put it on a floppy disk or on a cd. Once you run the driver you should be able to use that lexar on that computer.... If you use a different ( particularly a newer... not bigger necessarily but newer ) then you might need to run the driver again.