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The power window system uses all metal gears both externally and internally, except for this one plastic gear, which I assume is plastic to be a controllable failure point without damaging other parts of the system, particularly the window.
After tearing it apart, I found further damage with the motor that preceeded the gearing stripping. This picture shows the motor taken apart, but partly cleaned so you can't see all the rust and crap and was inside the internal gearing mechanism.
What it looked like to me was that somehow water got inside and rusted all the metal parts, causing the c-clip to fail, when caused the gear shaft to become loose. This shaft fits in a rectangular hole which keeps it nice and solid, but the hole became rounded and the gear was now wobling around.
It could also be that wear from normal use caused the rounded hole, which caused the gear shaft to become loose, which allowed water inside, which destroyed the c-clip making it worse and rusting everything out.
I suspect this is the root cause of all 80 series power window failures and almost all 80 series driver's side power window motors look like this to one degree or another.
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