I just had another idea. Do you, by any chance, have one of those programs that defines global shortcuts for the function keys installed? Its keyboard shortcut definitions may be conflicting with Exposé - and the reason your Mac is beeping would be that the action assigned to those keys isn't valid when you're pressing them.
It may not be the same for you, but when I had that happen it was because of a program I had installed called "Backlight". You don't happen to have that running do you?