Having three deployment errors when deploying the entire metadata for the org: There are no other errors, just these three.
 
workflows/Question.workflow -- Error: Cannot create workflow directly; must create the CustomObject first
workflows/Reply.workflow -- Error: Cannot create workflow directly; must create the CustomObject first
settings/Search.settings -- Error: Entity is null or entity element's name is null
 
These are showing up during deployment with both Ant Migration Tool, or via Force.com IDE. We didn’t make any edits to any of these three files or related features.

What could be causing the issues and how to fix them?