Degenerations of Godeaux surfaces and exceptional vector bundles

A recent construction of Hacking relates the classification of stable vector bundles on a surface of general type with $p_g = 0$ and the boundary of the moduli space of deformations of the surface. In the present paper we analyze this relation for Godeaux surfaces. We provide a description of certain boundary components of the moduli space of Godeaux surfaces. Also we explicitly construct certain exceptional vector bundles of rank 2 on Godeaux surfaces, stable with respect to the canonical class, and examine the correspondence between the boundary components and such exceptional vector bundles.