Just plug the Garmin USB stick into the Surface.
The earth's surface isn't a very good conductor.
I was also having problems syncing last night, until I opened garmin express itself and it announced that it needed to update. Wasn't going to tell me that in the popup notifications though, just "there was a problem syncing". #useful
Yeah I had that problem recently too annoying - worse yet the auto upload r didn't work!
Garmin Express tells me almost every time that there was an error syncing so I open it up and it tells me it was unable to sync but then in AP I can upload my data through Garmin Connect anyway.