just wanted to say that was a nice post on how to get the door panel off... I did want to add however, that I had the same problem. The door would open from the inside, but not from the outside... I have to say that buying an entirely new door
handle for a 960 and having it painted seems like an extreme solution, so I wanted to post how I fixed mine and maybe save some people time and money...

I took the door panel off and sound/mositure shield and also removed the door handle. The door handle can be removed from the door but it does take a little fiddling and twisting to get it to come out. When I inspected the problem before removal I noticed that when moving the inside lever to open the door, the rod that actuates the hinge movement moved up a lot farther than when I used the handle from the outside.The outside handle just wasn't pulling the rod up far enough to completely open the door hinge away from the striker post on the doorjam. In my case the rod needed to be adjusted to take up the slack in the wear of the working parts in the outer door handle. If the outer handle is totally floppy there is most likely a broken plastic part in the handle mechanism and the door handle will need to be replaced.
After I removed the door handle I was able to dislodge the rod, there is a clip that holds the rod at the bottom where it goes into the hinge mechanism that you need to undo, if I remember right you might only be able to see in there with a mirror. The upper part was easy to remove. Usually with these rods it is easy to adjust them by spinning a treaded coupling on the rod to in essence make the rod shorter. Again if memory serves me I couldn't adjust the rod far enough in the door itself and I had to remove it. I seems that someone had already adjusted the rod in this door as short as the threads would allow and it still wasn't working. I knew it would work, but I just needed the rod to be shorter. I
unthreaded the rod completely from the coupling and since there was still plenty of theads below where it had stopped I just cut a small piece off the top of the rod and ran a file across it to make sure it would thread back in nicely. The hard part of this job was putting everything back together. It is much easier to take that adjusting rod out of the clip and hole than to put them back in. I remember having very little room and not being able to actually see what I was doing and had to "braille" it.But Im happy to say that when everything was finally back together the door opened very easily and has been working for almost a year since then. Considering there was no cost and it was all my labor I would reccomend you try this before buying a complete handle to replace one that might still work. hope this helps
ELM