It’s probably the cord going bad. You can find a replacement generic one at Amazon or cellphone accessory places for about $5.
You want a Sansa Fuze sync cord. The same cord is used for the Sansa E200 so you can also look under that.
Don’t use an iPod cord–it will fry the battery.
The reason I think it’s the cord is that the cord has separate connections for charging and data. It sounds like your data connection went first but you could still charge.
