Ever since I bought my car the little cap that sits on top of the infrared sensor where the defroster trim pieces meet has never been quite flush against the trim like it's supposed to be. It wasn't horrible and really has been more of an annoyance than anything, but this past weekend I noticed it seemed up much higher than normal and the appearance really bothered me, so I decided to investigate. Here's a bad photo of how it looks:



I removed the B and A pillar trims so I could remove the two defroster trims and see what the heck was going on. I discovered that at some point before my ownership, someone must have removed or attempted to remove the driver's side defroster trim and didn't slide it out from under the little lip that's molded into the dash housing and managed to break off the retaining lip so that two things happen - first, the defroster trim panel isn't secured in place on the dash like it's supposed to be, and second, with the broken-off lip being gone, the center cover that's elevated in my picture is missing one of the places it's supposed to clamp to. I tried fiddling around with it and getting the other arm to clip on to the dash, but no joy.

So I'm thinking I'm totally screwed in that there's no way the trim pieces will ever fit together properly with the actual dash housing lip broken off. It looks like the only was to get the center cover to "sit down" where it belongs is to secure it by drilling a small pilot hole in the dash and using a small screw to secure it down, but I don't know if this is the best way to fix it. The underside of the cover had a bunch of double-side tape on it already, so obviously that's an unsuccessful fix already attempted by the PO or his repair shop.

Has anyone dealt with this issue before and found a way to secure both the defroster trim and center cap in place? I'm in need of ideas on how to resolve this one.