Which Views hook do I use to alter the view results page before it loads?
The answer was to remove the views_get_view function as well as the set->display function. There was also no need to try to execute the exposed input. All that was needed is to simply set the default values for the variables I wanted in the views_pre_view hook, and then Views takes care of the rest as it finishes doing its thing. Here is the resulting, correctly working code:

function zipcode_filter_views_pre_view  ( &amp;$view, &amp;$display_id, &amp;$args) {

    $view-&gt;display['default']-&gt;handler-&gt;options['title'] = "this is the new title";
    $view-&gt;exposed_input['distance']['postal_code'] = $_SESSION['zipcode_filter']['zip'];
    $view-&gt;exposed_input['distance']['search_distance'] = $_SESSION['zipcode_filter']['distance'];

}


Although, I don't understand why this works - Why do I not need to specify a display? Why did having the other parts of earlier code cause it to not work properly?