AS3, htmlText, bold <b> throwing of letter spacing. letters crashing into each other.

I have an htmlText field that holds a few paragraphs of text that is pulled from an xml file. There are <b> bold tags within the xml node.

When a section of bold text is in the middle of normal text, the normal text will crash into the beginning & end of the bold text, see pic:

I'm assuming that the bold text and the regular text  have different letter spacing so I removed the  ".letterSpacing = .2;" from the font declaration in order to let the text render at it's normal letter spacing. That helped a little in making the crashing a little less but it hasn't cleared it up completely.  Also, depending on the font size, the letter crashing acts differently.

Is there a way to better control the letter spacing of bold text next to normal text in a dynamic text field?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Zak