For laser-beams, I've found it works well to use a X-prop style quad with a simple laser beam texture. This way you can make the beam look like anything you want by changine the texture image, giving the effect described by RossC, or anything else you want.
Even better would be a single quad, which you would dynamically rotate along it's local Z axis (assuming it's Z axis would represent the length of the beam) so that it faces the camera all the time (I think this is called Axial Billboarding, although I'm not sure).
Jazz: For a lightsaber effect I would use a transparent colored cyllinder, and an array of camera-facing sprites along the length of the cyllinder, sort of like a static, motionless, particle effect (to do this you would just parent the sprites to the light saber mesh). This would create a surrounding glow along the length of the lightsaber.
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