Well, first off, whichever you use, if you don't leave auto-sensing on both sides, be sure to hard set both the AP and the switch to the same settings. To be honest, when connecting Cisco devices to other Cisco devices, it isn't so much of a problem, it's just good practice. When you connect different vendors, all sorts of problems occur if theres miss-matches. Also auto-sensing between different vendors can be messy, but that's beside the point.
I don't know what your switches are, but personally when in doubt, I'd set the ports to 100 full duplex on the APs and your switches. As long as this doesn't give you any connection issues (particularly if it's a non-Cisco switch), stick with it. Of course your bottleneck will still be the 802.11 interface speed. So, what you also might want to do, is prune unnecessary vlans from the AP port trunk (assuming it's trunking). In addition, if you've got a very very busy network, you might want to set some aggregate policers on the switchport, and maybe limit the broadcast multicast rates too. This isn't normally necessary but it's an option especially if you want to run WiFi IPT.
If you only set 10 half duplex on your switchports, then they will run a little slower (bit rate wise anyway) than the 802.11 interface, so I think you’ve been miss-informed on that one. Effectively an 802.11g interface with 54Mbps clients could be running around 25Mbps half duplex max. If you had 802.11a interfaces too, potentially you’d be running well in excess of 10 half duplex.
Hope that helps.
