Enter special language characters in Windows (c)

Select regional and language settings in the Control Panel and then languages and details.

As well as EN (Australia), add EN (United States) and select the US International keyboard.
With the US International keyboard, you can enter special languages characters for language which use only latin characters. This requires pressing 2 keys in sequence as follows:

Press this key Then press this key Resultant character
' (APOSTROPHE) C Ç
'(APOSTROPHE) e, y, u, i, o, a é, ý, ú, í, ó, á
"(QUOTATION MARK) e, u, i, o, a ë, ü, ï, ö, ä
`(ACCENT GRAVE) e, u, i, o è, ù, ì, ò
~(TILDE) o, n õ, ñ
^(CARET) e, u, i, o, a ê, û, î, ô, â

(ref: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306560&sd=tech)

This is more practical when you are using the same (US) keyboard for all these languages. On the other hand, if you selected French as the language, with a french keyboard, the layout os azerty instead of qwerty.

Now I have to work out how to select the Russian phonetic keyboard for Windows (c). Under Ubuntu linux, I was able to select the Russian phonetic keyboard, which tries to preserve the keys which are common between Latin and Russian keyboards (which the conventional Russian keyboard layout does not)