Context 3 problems on node pages

Using a sub theme based off Fusion starter lite and Context 3 wasn't rendering blocks assigned to it when viewing node pages. Worked fine on panel pages though, and context inspector was showing the correct context and reactions were being detected on the node pages.

After much search I found the following code to be the problem:

// Add node_top and node_bottom region content
$vars['node_top'] = theme('blocks', 'node_top');
$vars['node_bottom'] = theme('blocks', 'node_bottom');

These 2 regions aren't in Fusion lite by default (at least not in the .info file that I can see). Is it possible a check goes in somewhere that checks for these regions before calling theme('blocks')?

In the meantime I just copied the fusion_core_preprocess_node function into my sub theme's template php and removed the above lines.