Remove separator from breadcrumb
Have you reviewed this page? 

https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21theme.inc/function/theme_breadcrumb/7

Also, what theme are you using? I would check the base theme to make sure that it isn't preprocessing the breadcrumbs itself. If so, you'll need to make sure you are calling the appropriate function in order to override the breadcrumb settings.