Fedora Users — accented characters on us keyboard

I'm using a Trust keyboard (101 keys), US layout, but with the Euro symbol printed on the digit 5. When installing, I chose "us keyboard". Under this setup, the Euro symbol is not available. I searched archives and read up several websites, and finally understood how to use xmodmap to get the Euro symbol when pressing the windows key and 5 together. I also discovered that vim has an excellent compose feature, although by default is doesn't know about the Euro. I managed to add the Euro symbol using the "digraphs" command.

I also need to occasionally use accented characters. This is where it gets complicated for me. I searched some more, and found I can change to a "us international" keybaord, on which there are "dead keys", which I can use to get accented characters. But that is quite annoying, as the dead keys are the quotes, backtick and tilde, and on linux, I often use those keys. I have to press a space after the key to get the quote or tilde. And if I forget, I end up with an accented character :(

What I would ideally like is to have normal use of all they keys, but to be able to have a special key (compose key) that I can use to generate accented characters. I could use the windows key, right ALT key, or menu key for that. But even after searching various sites, I haven't been able to understand how I can achieve this. To be honest, there's a *lot* of information out there on international keyboards under linux. Some articles go into such great detail, leaving me confused. Others are too brief, or distro-specific. I haven't been able to find a decent article of a page that says "put this and that value in /etx/X11/XF86Config to get the windows key to act as compose.

Would a kind soul please help me achieve what I want?