I finally got around to fixing my door handle problem. I decided to poke around the interior door mechanisms to find out why my handle was not returning to a flush position. Here's what I found to fix the problem:

I removed the inner door panel and peeled back the water shield on the end closest to the exterior door handle. There is a threaded rod that leads down from the exterior door handle to a yellow plastic clamp style retainer. (Sorry, no pic, but I don't think there's any way I could get a camera in there.) Pop the yellow retainer open and pop out the rod. Push the yellow retainer down and pop the rod back inon a lower portion of the threads. Test the handle a couple of times before you put the door back together, and if everything works fine, reassemble the door. Viola! Fixed.

 

My handle does this, it's so annoying. I'll givethis a try and see what happens.Thanks.

 

I'll get around to it in the next couple weeks...

 

Thanks! I was just about to make a post about this. Mine wasn't doing this until it came back from the body shop. My passenger side door handle sits flush, but it has a lot of slack in it (very loose, almost to the point of rattling) compared to the drivers side and this is causing the window to not have enough time to come down that inch before the door opens. They somehow messed up my wether striping channel for the window inside the door so I had to take the door panel off allready once. My window was rolling down slowly and making an annoying squeak/squeal when it first started going down.[:@]

 

This is great Im having the same problem, will try to do it today

 

Wow havent had this problem yet, and I hope I dont! Doesnt sound to hard to fix if it does though[:'(]

 

Update: Someone in aother forum used a similar method, but installed a nut on the threaded rod so that the clamp cannot slip again. He was somehow able to get a decent picture of the mechanism, so I will post it here.

The RED arrow is the threaded rod.
The BLUE arrow is where it connects to the exterior door handle.
The YELLOW arrow is the clamp style retainer.
The PINK arrow is the nut he threaded onto the rod.

[IMG]local://upfiles/42257/564AF48ED45240208304435BBAE89B6F.jpg[/IMG]

 

Bumping this for a friend of mine. Wish the picture was still in the thread , but the first post should still tell you all you need to know.