Why do I have to type a space after punctuation to see the character?

[Mario]

For instance when I type an opening quotation mark, the character doesn't appear until I type another character or a space. The same is true of other quotation characters which normally appear in the superscript position such as "'" or "-".

This is such an annoying thing, I like to see the characters appear as I type.

I'm using Windows 7 on a laptop. On the laptop keyboard, for some reason, the quote key (which has both double and single quote on it) is doing some "clever" annoying things:

When I press single-quote (or double-quote), Windows doesn't send any characters until I press it twice (resulting in '' or "")
When I press it before a vowel, I get some kind of accented character. As I usually only write English, this is annoying.

Your keyboard layout has probably been set to United States International. This is a Windows setting.

Method 1; Control Panel > Region > Formats > set English (United States) as your format.
Method 2; WIN+R > intl.cpl > Formats > set English (United States) as your format.