Rewritten: My original post seemed to be misunderstood. I have since reported it as a bug with the following description. My original post for this question
This is actually a confirmed bug both in ASP.NET MVC 1.0 with MVC Features library and in ASP.NET MVC 2.0. RenderAction behaves incorrectly when the request is POST. I have submitted the bug in ASP.NET Issue Tracker on Codeplex, please vote for it :) http://aspnet.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=5847