Comment 1 for bug 163585

In the KDE menu, a box is checked on Adept's entry for "run as different user". This is so that it prompts you for your sudo password. So running adept using sudo isn't "a workaround", it's the normal way of things. Is there a setting for this in the xfce menu editor? If not, you should be able to change the command that executes to "sudo adept-manage" and have it work properly.
I'm not sure if this is an adept bug or an xfce one.