That is expected (if not desirable) behavior.

J, what do you mean by expected? Is this now standard in the post-2014 updates? Why? Was this programmed deliberately?

It works fine for me. Are you stopping playback with the control, NOT with the spacebar? 

Correct.

Perhaps it's a Windows thing. But clicking the "return to start" button in Scroll View does not return to the start of the file. When the file has been stopped, it does nothing. When the file is playing, the button returns the playback cursor to the left of the current screen (although that may have to do with my Playback being set to "Play from leftmost measure).

This is in score view.

When you typed "...The only way to skip back to the beginning is to type "1" in the measure field," that indicated to me that you were in scroll view.

In Page view, the back arrows are grayed out when playback has been stopped.

Hi Edward,

You are experiencing an issue that we do know happens in Finale v25.1 and later (https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005393168). This is on Windows only since the playback controls between the two platforms have different behavior, so Mac users will not experience this. Fixing this will most likely be part of a larger update to make the playback controls function in a more universal manner, but that is not certain at this point.