I know there are sites out there that are willing to exchange links with other sites and some of them put a meta no follow tag so the page doesnt get crawled. My question is that the link on the page with the no follow tag count as a reciprocal link? or does the SE's see it as one way link since the other page is not crawled. Anyone know?
if they have a meta nofollow tag at the top of the page it doesn't mean that the SEs don't crawl the page or necessarily mean that the SEs don't see the links. if the person has a noindex in the meta robots tag then, as long as the SEs behave themselves (which Yahoo currently doesn't), they shouldn't index the page or be aware of the links, which effectively creates a one-way link.
If they have the page/folder blocked in the robot.txt file, then you are probably not seeing any benefit as BrianR suggest... they are doing something that is not SE friendly... If you see that they are going to the lengths of deliberately putting a nofollow in a link exchange link... I wouldn't trade with them...