LaTeX freezes on \begin{SCfigure}

Question

I need side figure captions but using SCfigure freezes LaTeX as described here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/latex-beamer/forums/forum/319190/topic/1589887

Do you have any solutions to this problem or any ideas of how to get side caption without problematic package?

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{sidecap}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{A nice frame}
\begin{SCfigure}
\rule{4cm}{4cm}
\caption{A nice figure}
\end{SCfigure}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Answer 1

There is no requirement to use sidecap in order to create side caption in beamer. Some box manipulation would suffice. Here's a small example:

\documentclass{beamer}% http://ctan.org/pkg/beamer
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
  \frametitle{A nice frame}
  \begin{figure}
  \begin{minipage}[b]{4cm}\rule{4cm}{4cm}\end{minipage}
  \begin{minipage}{4cm}\caption{A nice figure}\end{minipage}
  \end{figure}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Depending on the shape of your image (or perhaps unknown dimensions), some changes may be required. However, fixes should be fairly trivial.

Regardless, you technically don't need to use \caption since there's no numbered image structure that will be referenced across frames. You can just place the caption text using the same format/style if need be.

Answer 2

First many thanks to Ian Thompson for providing minimal working example. Secondly, I fully agree with azetina that this is a compatibility issue. Now additional question - where should I submit a bug report in that case? Last but not least answer provided by Werner is excellent but I just want to provide my alternative solution using columns.

\begin{figure}
    \begin{columns}%
        \begin{column}{0.3\textwidth}%
            \includegraphics[height=0.25\textheight]{images/some-image}
        \end{column}%
        \begin{column}{0.53\textwidth}%
            \caption{some caption}
        \end{column}%
    \end{columns}
\end{figure}