I'd like to replace my panel with avant-window-navigator. Since the menu plugin of awn shows the gnome version of the menu (e.g. no xfce settings) I use a starter with '/usr/bin/xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu -p' as menu button. But to have this work, I must have a menu plugin somewhere in a xfce panel, even if i don't need it there. Please make '/usr/bin/xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu -p' show a menu on its own if it finds no plugin that will do the job. An alternative would be to add an --applicationsmenu option to xfdesktop.
I'm not going to implement the first option, plugins need to be separate from the panel. However the 2nd option is possible, but it needs some internal changes in the panel to work (it needs to return an exit code if no menu was shown), which I'd already planned for 4.10.
Fixed in 56b2c90.