Preventing bell flash with screen in putty

You can do what you want in a terminal-independent way using just your .screenrc:

vbell on
vbell_msg ''
termcapinfo *  vb=:

The settings are:

• first line (you already did this)
• second line cancels the Wuff, Wuff!
• third line sets the flash to an empty string

Note that the trailing colon (:) is needed for the termcap syntax used by screen.

To fully disable the bell, you first need to turn off the special bell treatment in screen. Having vbell on means the visual bell is on (opposite to the default), so a visual bell is emitted to the terminal. If the terminal does not support visual bells, the bell message is used. PuTTY never sees it as a true bell!

Set vbell off to turn off this behavior and use the normal bell instead. (See screen(1), search for vbell.)

Then, you need to configure your terminal emulator (PuTTY, in your case) to do what you want with the audible bell sequence. To do this, go into Change Settings, then Terminal > Bell, then select your preferred behavior.

Select None to disable the bell entirely, Visual bell to flash the window, or one of the audible bell options to have the system make a sound.

Assuming your screen instance is configured correctly, you should be seeing the desired behavior after you click Apply.