What with having been a "roving unix sysadmin" frequently being deployed to customer sites for troubleshooting, I have found myself knowing enough vi to confuse my fingers.

To that end, I have a small piece of code in my .emacs to take care of most beeps. I hope other in the same situation might find it useful.

(setq wq "Emacs, not vi!")

That ensures that ESC : w q RET gives a useful message rather than beeps.