My L button is slowly dying.  I can't shoot in Metroid unless I play left-handed, and DK: King of Swing is out of the question.

Anybody have any brilliant ideas?

lift it up and blow on it. It has dust under it. Use your lungs or compressed air.

How high can you safely lift the button up?

This is kinda spooky.

Just push it as high as it will go. It's stuck on there pretty good. Made from polymer, same stuff they make glocks out of.

Lift it high as it'll go from the outside, and blow like hell. Then go fix your DS.

So, heh. Did it work?

I got the L button pulled up pretty high and it got stuck and scared the shit out of me. I cleaned out all the nasty shit I could find while it was stuck, and then I got it back on, and the button won't do anything for me. Last night it was responding about 50% of the time, and today it slowed down to 0%, and it's still there. I'll try it again.

you've got some black goo jammed in your button hole.

If you do that you should be careful when reassembling  because tons of people broke their power switches because of not closing it right.(thats if it is a ds lite).

I had the same problem with the R button like 2 months ago... too much Mario Kart. But yes, I only blew on it and it works fine since then.