BTW, if you're interested in using images alongside entry-footer links and hiding the separators, instead of say, using bullets in place of separators, carriep63 wrote some theme layer code for that:
I guess her code works without the links displaying twice like they do with the other coding we've tried, so you may want to give that a shot, since her code should allow you to tweak the CSS as needed to keep the links inline and spaced out nicely.