Recent research indicates that transient errors will increasingly become a critical concern in microprocessor design. As embedded processors are widely used in reliability-critical or noisy environments, it is necessary to develop cost-effective fault-tolerant techniques to protect processors against transient errors. The register file is one of the critical components that can significantly affect microprocessor system reliability, since registers are typically accessed very frequently, and transient errors in registers can be easily propagated to functional units or the memory system, leading to silent data error (SDC) or system crash. This paper focuses on investigating the impact of register file soft errors on system reliability and developing cost-effective techniques to improve the register file immunity to soft errors. This paper proposes the register vulnerability factor (RVF) concept to characterize the probability that register transient errors can escape the register file and thus potentially affect system reliability. We propose an approach to compute the RVF based on register access patterns. In this paper, we also propose two compiler-directed techniques and a hybrid approach to improve register file reliability cost-effectively by lowering the RVF value. Our experiments indicate that on average, RVF can be reduced to 9.1% and 9.5% by the hyperblock-based instruction re-scheduling and the reliability-oriented register assignment respectively, which can potentially lower the reliability cost significantly, without sacrificing the register value integrity.