It's really great to see this thread still alive, loving all the mods and repairs.
Posting this crude disassembly and menu joystick repair for an ASUS PQ27V for anyone out there looking for steps like I was.
1. Insert something flat in the marked holes (I used a flat screwdriver) and twist gently and enough to get a gap wide enough to insert a credit card or any tool thin enough.
2. Start sliding the card towards the clips and pop them with the card or with a guitar pick or similar.
3. Do it on all sides and gently tilt the cover towards the left and unhook the flex cable.
4. The button/joystick is attached to the covers with two philips screws, remove them and disconnect also the flex for the led board at the bottom.
5. Unfortunately I didn't grab any pics of the board itself but if the stick is loose as it usually is then it probably broke off and the remaining part is still attached to the button assembly.
What I did was to de-solder the metal cover keeping the button intact and glued together the pieces.
There's two tabs like this on opposite side. (This pic is post repair)
Make sure to line up the pieces exactly where it broke off and put some glue on it, I used Loctite Power flex Gel.
Yellow line is where the break was.
Unfortunately doing this (using glue) will make the stick somewhat harder to operate since the black cross is supposed to slide along the stick when pressed down for the ENTER function but now it's all locked together. I made it somewhat more functional by making the bumps on the cross more pronounced by dabbing a tiny amount of glue on them.
TINY!
Now if you made the same mistake I did then you won't be able to get the shield back on, so what i did was to cut it and thus I was able to slide it back into position and solder back the tabs on the board.
Just the necessary
Tabs! Like in your browser
Test your handy work and make necessary adjustments.
Another alternative is to remove the whole thing and just leave the buttons beneath the cross exposed so they can be pushed from the outside with a plastic probe like a NDSL stylus.
At the time of writing I couldn't find any replacement sticks, also what was ASUS engineers thinking on when they decided to make such an important button completely in plastic?
Tahtah!