  We argue that the hidden sector potential energy is generically of order the
intermediate scale although the true cosmological constant does vanish. This
would significantly change the predicted values of soft parameters for a
variety of supergravity models including those derived from string theory. We
stress that this point is particularly relevant for supergravity models in
which the soft masses of observable fields vanish at tree level. Implications
of a nonzero hidden sector potential energy for low energy phenomenology are
also studied.
