OK, I finally hit on a combination that works. The target machine is booted off of the 10.5.0 client installer. Then if I Initiate asr from the command line in terminal, rather than from Disk Utility, everything works great.
OK, I booted the machine from a 10.4.0 install disk. If I try to run Restore from Disk Utility, is asks me to authenticate. I have no idea how to authenticate to an install DVD. But I ran asr from the command line and it “seems” to be working so far.