As a good Xfce user I know some gnome-kde alternative applications. One of the best of this crew is certainly Wicd, a Network manager. First of all it handles wired and wireless networks in a cute graphical environment, but most important it works flawlessly with many wireless cards and chipset, has a ndiswrapper support and it is relatevely easy to open a backdoor and create your profile as you need.
I mean if you have a strange wifi setup due to your system admin at work or internet provider at home, or a reserved wifi connection in your university campus, you can create a simple text file to send required parameters to wifi-supplicant wich still does its job.
