Many thanks for the help so far folks. Couple more problems. The passenger door mirror has smashed off breaking the internal alloy fixing rendering it completely useless. How do you gain access to the fixing bolts - I assume the inner door card has got to be taken off but how? On an old Audi I had you could just take off the little internal plastic plate covering the mirror.

The other problem is the drivers door lock barrel which appears to be turned out of alignment - the key won't lock the door. The only way to lock the car is from the inside and then lock the passenger door. Again the central locking doesn't work. I guess I'll have to strip the inner door card off and have a look. Any ideas or suggestions on this one?

Many thanks Bob

Haynes says remove the whole door card....you might get away with just removing the black trim on inside of mirror bracket!! (four clip pins..just lever the trim and pull) then this reveals the fixing screws for the mirror!!!

I used to own an Astra and could have the mirror off in less than a minute, pull off trim and unscrew mirror - it was that simple.

On the Fabia it's like an hours job! Remove door card carefully, following correct procedure, or risk damage to trim and clips etc. Then you can pop off the cover which is held on by 3 clips, then you can unscrew the 1 fixing screw which is accessed between the sound deadening foam, then you can remove the mirror.

Great example of over engineering and making a job much harder than it needs to be (if the cover didn't go down behind the door card). Still I bet Skoda garages have raked in many extra hours for what should be a quick and easy job.

Cheers guys. Managed to get the mirror off - mighty fiddly. Screws, clips and door pulls all over the car now!

As for the door lock barrel. Managed to get it out following one of the guides on the site here. It would appear that the lock had seized up. Phoned the local Skoda dealer who said they could get another barrel cut at the factory which would take two weeks and would cost about £65. As I'm on a very tight budget I decided to have a look myself. After liberal dousing of the barrel with WD40 and scraping away the corrosion and gunge of many years I managed to take (press out forcibly) each of the locking plates out of the barrel and clean them up. Reassembling one at a time and it seems to be OK. I have purchased a lock repair kit to replace the pin and cage at the back of the lock.

A time consuming repair but hopefully it will have worked and saved a wad of cash (probably to spend on some other repair jobs!).