Image captions and footer background

Hi, the image captions are getting squished over to the right side and are preceded by a hyphen, sort of like a list bullet. I an fix the padding issue by adding

.wp-caption .wp-caption-text {
	padding-left:  8px;
}

to the custom CSS, but the hyphen remains, with the caption riding on top of it. This makes the first part of the caption difficult to read. How can I get rid of the hyphen? Also, how can I change the background for the widget area of the footer? thanks