Which doesn't work, at least on the TT.
Indeed. I think the concensus was its the felt pad internally thats the issue, it gets wet and freezes to the glass. Then when you try to drop the window slightly on opening the door it can't.
I have one of the TTs with this issue. What I find is that even if its not rained for days if I lower my window and raise it again its wet. I can do this like 3-5 times before it basically comes up dryish.
I keep forgetting to do this to try to reduce the freezing issue. It got me about 3-4 times last year, once so far this winter.
On the TT if you only slightly pull the handle you can see if the window will drop before actually opening the door. Means you can then relock it if you choose. If you open the door it will keep trying to drop then sort of time out and stop.
You wont be able to close the door at this point as the doors drop in order to get the glass into a seal. All the other frameless cars I have had don't have this seal, they have a wider door seal that the glass presses against. Audis is a good design as its far better noise insulation, but its a bad design if you suffer the sorts of weather we do. Colder countries it tends to be drier as less air moisture so they seem to have less issues.
They do have a fix for the TT now it seems, but they lower the window slightly, which means the seal is less effective, so increases road noise into the cabin slightly.
On the TT the easiest way to fix it is some warm water over the door, below the handle, this easily defrosts the felt pad bit.
Personally now if there is a risk I just use the drivers door and put my bag into the passenger seat from that side rather than opening the passenger side.
The drivers door will almost close (first latch) and if I drive around 0.5-1 mile you will hear it drop and then raise. Easy to just reshut the door at this point. I think the combination of the heat starting to get through and the slight motion of the car gets it to detatch quite quickly.
It would probably thaw in around 3-4 minutes if your happy to sit there in the car, once it warms up a little. The issue is the switch will be sort of disabled so you cant keep pressing it as its gone into that sort of safe mode.