Sorting Hat, Harry the Horcrux + General Horcrux Musings

[Alon van Dam]

No: HPFGUIDX 133275

Ha! You know, Arthur's quote concerning not trusting thinking things 
if you can't see their brains has been with me throughout the series. 
It's generally been a very solid piece of advice. 

However, I don't think Dumbledore would have let the Sorting Hat 
continue doing its thing if he had even a remote suspicion that the 
Hat had been hoodwinked.

But this to me raises a number of very important questions about 
Horcruxes in general that we should consider:

1) In how far would the soul's personality be noticable when handling 
the item?

We know the diary had Riddle's personality all over it, but I doubt 
that the ring did and I'm pretty sure nobody noticed anything weird 
when they were chucking out the locket from Sirius' house in OotP...

2a) How long after a death must the Horcrux-creation-spell be cast?
2b) How long does the Horcruxation-spell(tm) take to cast?
2c) How much preparation must have been done to the item in question 
before it is Horcruxified(tm)?
2d) Can Horcruxification be done non-verbally?
2e) Is physical contact with the item necessary?

I'm going to assume that creating a Horcrux is a mind-bogglingly 
difficult thing to do, simply because of the rarity them and the way 
Slughorn, Riddle and Dumbledore were talking about them. These 
questions are important because the answers to any of these could 
disprove the theory of Harry the Horcrux immediately (short, long & 
long, no, yes - resp.) However, if the answers are favourable (long, 
short & short/na, yes, no - resp.) Riddle/Voldemort could have made 
the Hat into a Horcrux when he was sitting in Dumbledore's offce 
asking to be hired as a teacher. That would actually give us a reason 
as to why the heck he was there in the first place!

I'm interested in these questions in any case (and might post them up 
as general musings in a seperate post later), but my point is 
basically this: If Harry could have been turned into a Horcrux (a 
theory I certainly do not subsribe to), so could the Sorting Hat. It 
just depends on a lot of factors that we don't know much about, yet...

Thoughts?