I notice that you're on 32-bit while I'm on x86_64. That may or may not be relevant. I don't have any 32-bit machines around to test on though.
Maybe this is the problem then.
What we need is someone else to report that oprofile works on a 32-bit machine to confirm that I'm totally jinxed :-)
Check https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467651
It looks like in CentOS oprofile is built against older version of binutils. When I installed the same version of binutils and oprofile from RHEL - everything started to work.
Mindaugas