After more testing I have narrowed the issue that I left off with to a problem with the yum conf inside of the chroot.
I just got the patch working to the centos-5 postinstall script that does fix this issue. So to clarify I did add to /etc/rinse/centos-5.packages
Those package were
e2fsprogs-libs
authconfig
That was early in the debugging and after I found the real issue I removed those packages without causing issues.
So what do you need to do to bootstrap centos5 with rinse? All you need to do is apply a small patch to the post install script. Here is the patch rinse-centos5.patch.
Here is how you apply it.
As root:
cd /usr/lib/rinse/centos-5
wget http://www.cmdln.org/images/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/rinse-centos5.patch
patch -p0 < rinse-centos5.patch [/bash]