This may not work for anyone else but I thought I'd share my recent experience.

Finale 2014.5 running on Windows 10 suddenly stopped playing back scores. The cursor bar just parked parked itself on measure one, beat one. Nothing I tried in Midi/Audio had any effect nor did restarting my computer (five times).A few days ago I had installed a new software firewall so, as unlikely as it was to be causing the problem, I uninstalled it. No joy. 

For no reason other than to be thorough, I logged in as Administrator and found that Finale worked fine. The problem was specific to my user account. While still logged in as Admin, I noticed that there was a new icon in the task bar. When I put the mouse pointer over it, I got a message saying that Finale was using my microphone. 

When I logged back into my user account, I discovered that I had inadvertently turned off access to the mic for all applications. Switching it back on solved the playback issue. 

I hope that this helps someone.

Harry Heightman

Salt Lake City