Sorry for not responding to this issue in a more timely fashion... recently I had reason to try this again on a fresh, clean (I believe) project and found a few more bits of information:
If I select an entry in the Symbol List in the "Find Symbol" tool dialog and press enter (or double click the entry) it works fine as long as the target of the jump is not currently open. However if the file is already open, the cursor is moved to the correct location in that buffer, but the buffer isn't made active. If I use the "Go to definition" button in the dialog (or press F12), the target location is made active (but the "Find Symbol" dialog doesn't go away - is that the expected behavior?).
So in summary, everything seems to work except making the target location's buffer active if the file is already open and I'm trying to navigate by double-clicking or pressing enter on an entry in the Symbol List.
In case it matters, I'm now running SE v17.0.3.0 32-bit with hotfix_se1703_10_cumulative.zip on Ubuntu 12.04