Better way for stopping simulations on timeline? I have been working on a lot of fire and water sims for a project.

The problem I am having is after baking the sims and then playing them back to see how it looks, the timeline gets "frozen" while it's loading the next frame. 

Example: I have a fire sim that was baked out, then I hit play to see it in the viewport and after halfway through I realize I want to change some settings. However, when I hit Pause/Stop on the timeline it doesn't always register that I want to stop it because it is preparing the next frame. So it leads me in an endless loop not recognizing that I hit pause. I have to time it perfect when a frame is about to end, but this is frustrating because if I don't do it at the right time it hits play again. 

Although ALT+A works a little better it still gives me a similar problem. 

Anyone have a better way to cancel the timeline animation (like you can hit escape to cancel a render) and actually have it register the 1st time?
If you keep the mouse over the pause button in the timeline until the next frame is updated, it should register your click eventually. AFAIK the problem is that during a frame update, all of Blender's UI is locked (including all hotkeys), so consequently, nothing will be able to stop it while updating an individual frame. 

This is universal for anything in Blender (and I think any app) that locks up the interface for a while. It doesn't log the position of the mouse until it has time to handle the click event. Sort of unfortunate, but that's just the way it works.