Section "Typing Russian (with system keyboard tools under non-Russian Windows)" of my site at http://WinRus.com explains how to force Windows to stop using as "RU" a standard Russian keyboard layout and start using so called phonetic (homophonic) layout where A-А, K-К, O-О, ...

Here is the image of my Russian phonetic layout again - you can print this page and have a piece of paper as a reference. This variant of Phonetic layout is usually called "YaWert", because Russian 'В' is assigned to 'W':

Symbol 'number' - № - that a Standard Russian layout has, can be obtained on Phonetic layout, too - via a combination of buttons: Ctrl/Alt/5.
Symbol currency Euro - via a combination of buttons Ctrl/Alt/E.

Here is the image of the 1st additional variant I offer. It differs from the main one only by assignments for Russian letters 'Ж' and 'В'. This variant of Phonetic layout is usually called "YaZHert", because Russian 'Ж' is assigned to 'W':

Here is the image of the 2nd additional variant I offer. It's called "Student" and is also widely used:

My phonetic layout (that is, a variant of positioning Russian letters on the keyboard) has the following characteristics (I am talking about first two where it's my own placement of letters and symbols; 3rd one is not mine, just was among popular ones, so I decided to provide its support in new versions of MS Windows):

• The Russian letters are in the same place as the similar English ones:
  'A'-'A', 'O'-'O', etc.
   
  
• most of the important non-alphabetical symbols (punctuation marks, etc.) are in their usual (for US English keyboard) places
  (unlike standard  MS Russian layout where to type a punctuation mark in a Russian text, one has to switch keyboard to English).

  I had to assign a Russian letter 'Ь/ь' to the "+" symbol, but it's not a big deal because "+" is almost never present in a Russian text (unlike symbol "-" which is often used in a text)

Note. There are also two phonetic layouts for national keyboards - German and Italian:

for Italian:

Made by an Italian student who studies Russian. He made it based on my Student variant:
"marillo" wrote about his "Russo fonetico su Italiano (142)":

on italian keyboard we have all vocals with accent, like a', e', i', o' and u', so I put all vocals out of kbd (я, э, й, ё, ю) on them, so ь, ж I put on q and j, while щ and ъ on "w" and "b" + AltGr"

Download: italian.zip

for German:

Download: kbdru_de.zip