Of course I should have mentioned this was via rutorrent front end - but you knew that right mad_ady

Think the problem has nothing to do with certs or https or anything tricky. Path to curl is hardcoded wrong.
# which curl
/bin/curl
# grep curl /var/www/plugins/rutorrent/conf/config.php
"curl" => '/usr/bin/curl', // Something like /usr/bin/curl. If empty, will be founded in PATH.
In the old app I built I just left it blank.
# grep curl /tmp/rt/work/app-build/src/rtorrent-0.9.2/var/www/rutorrent-3.4/conf
/config.php
"curl" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/curl. If empty, will be found in PATH.
In fact the only thing I defined was php-cgi as the php to use:
$pathToExternals = array(
"php" => '/usr/bin/php-cgi', // Something like /usr/bin/php. If empty, will be found in PATH.
"curl" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/curl. If empty, will be found in PATH.
"gzip" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/gzip. If empty, will be found in PATH.
"id" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/id. If empty, will be found in PATH.
"stat" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/stat. If empty, will be found in PATH.
);
I setup another box with rutorrent and created the rss feed then just copied over the file into /var/www/plugins/rutorrent/share/users/wdlxtv/settings/rss/cache/ and it worked fine.