Odd behavior for double quote key on US keyboard

I've recently invested in a new Dell Precision T5500 workstation. I'm really happy with it, apart from the fact that:

1. The fans are really loud and because the fan noise isn't constant, it really gets on my nerves. I'll need to find some kind of cupboard to stick it in out of the way.
2. I wanted a UK/Ireland keyboard and the Dell representative changed the order in between the quote and final order to a US/Europe keyboard. I'm constantly typing the wrong characters!

Anyway, I can cope with the different keyboard layout, but what was really driving me nuts, was the way the keyboard was handling quotation marks. It appeared to use "smart quotes", which means that when you hit the quote key, it waits for the next key before it decides which quotation mark it will use.

The problem with this (especially as a programmer), is I just want the bog standard basic "dumb" double quotation mark, and quite often I go back and add quotation marks around text, rather than typing them inline. The only solution I could find until today was to double type the quotation mark and then delete the second one. Highly annoying.

This isn't just a Word feature, but across the board. I'm not sure if it is anything to do with Windows 7 specifically, but I found that if I changed the keyboard via (Control Panel -> Region and Language -> Keyboards and Languages) from "United States - International" to "United States - US", the problem went away.

i hope this helps others who are experiencing an unexpected odd behavior with double and single quotation marks on their keyboards!