Fatal error: Call to a member function set_display() on a non-object

found the issue own my own, though this may be worth adding to the codebase. The problem occurred because i had a view that had been long deleted from the site. changing the following code to views_panes.inc allowed me to get past this

before:

function views_content_views_panes_content_type_admin_info($subtype, $conf, $contexts) {
  $info = array();

  list($view_name, $display_name) = explode('-', $subtype);
  $view = views_get_view($view_name);

  $view->set_display($display_name);

after:

function views_content_views_panes_content_type_admin_info($subtype, $conf, $contexts) {
  $info = array();

  list($view_name, $display_name) = explode('-', $subtype);
  $view = views_get_view($view_name);
  if (!is_object($view)) return;
  $view->set_display($display_name);