Somehow I keep hitting a shortcut key (or something similar) that enables the input of accented text. Whenever this accented text mode is enabled, pressing ' doesn't respond immediately; instead, the ' key is remembered, so if I press a vowel after that, I get the vowel with an acute accent mark, and if I press any other key, I immediately get an apostrophe followed by the other key.

I don't want this to happen. It's very annoying. How do I disable this mode?

I only remember seeing this in Firefox 3.6.3 and Pidgin 2.6.6, so maybe it's a GTK feature. It apparently happens on a per-application basis, and restarting the application fixes it. I checked Windows 7's "Region and Language" control panel and didn't see anything relevant (although I'm not intimately familiar with all of those settings, so I may have overlooked something).