Write a function that gets the current visibility status of the plots on the current figure, turns their visibility off, invokes the plotbrowser, drawnow(), wait for the plot browser to finish, and restore the visibility.
If you have been invoking the plotbrowser from the command line, call the above script.
If you have been invoking the plotbrowser from the figure icon, then write an additional function that digs through the figure menu toolbars, finds the function that clicking that icon invokes, and bashes that menu entry to call the function described in the first paragraph.
Caution: I do not promise at the moment that the plotbrowser opens a window that you can wait for easily. It could be as bad as having to go into the java level and find the java handle of the plotwindow in order to be able to waitfor() on that.
If you were hoping for an easy way of doing this... sorry, nothing like that documented.