A single-user wireless communication system employing multiple transmit and receive antennas and adopting BPSK modulation is considered in this paper. Improved versions of the linear decorrelating and minimum mean square error (MMSE) receivers, and of the nonlinear ing and cancellation (V-BLAST) receiver are developed and analyzed. In particular, we show that the improved receivers outperform the conventional ones both in terms of the error probability and near-far resistance, which is introduced here as a measure of the receiver robustness to the power disparities experienced by the data streams transmitted by different antennas. Finally, we also consider the situation in which the propagation channel is not perfectly known to the receiver, and show that the performance of the improved receivers is less sensitive to the channel estimation errors.