Key processing problem

[Dumm Homey]

Hi all, I've been working on a little app some friends and I need to
help us enter a lot of XML data. There are a few places where html code
is entered in, and it's silly to keep typing <b>, </b> etc. My plan was
to set it up where you could just hit ctrl+b/ctrl+i (for <i></i>) and it
would toggle between the open and close tags, OR if there is text
selected, will return that text enclosed by the appropriate tags.

It works. Sort of...

The problem is that the bold key works perfectly, exactly what I wanted.
Meanwhile, the italics key, which uses the EXACT SAME CODE as the bold
key, inserts a bunch of spaces/tabs or something, and erases text in the
box when it does it. I notice that in an empty textbox or richtextbox,
hitting Ctrl+I seems to do a long tab (about 8 spaces or so).

Is this Ctrl+I something I'm not going to be able to override? I've been
googling for about an hour now and still haven't come up with a solution
for this. If anyone can help, I'd greatly appreciate it.